Food Insecurity as a Security Challenge

Please join the Center for Strategic and International Studies for a Smart Women, Smart Power conversation with Ambassador (ret.) Ertharin Cousin, former executive director of the World Food Programme. She will discuss global food insecurity and hunger and the role they play in other security issues, including violent extremism.

Ambassador Cousin served as executive director of the World Food Programme from 2012 to 2017. It’s the world’s largest humanitarian organization, with 14,000 staff who aid some 80 million people in 75 countries. She previously served as the U.S. ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome.
Prior to her global work on food security, Ambassador Cousin was executive vice president and chief operating officer of America’s Second Harvest, which is now known as Feeding America, a confederation of more than 200 U.S. foodbanks that serve more than 50 million meals annually.

She currently serves as the Payne Distinguished Lecturer and Visiting Fellow at the Center on Food Security and Environment and the Center on Democracy, Development and Rule of Law at the Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies at Stanford University. She is also a Distinguished Fellow of Global Agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs Ambassador Cousin is a Chicago native and holds degrees from the University of Illinois at Chicago and the University of Georgia School of Law. She was named one of TIME’s “100 Most Influential People,” and Foreign Policy magazine’s “500 Most Powerful People on the Planet.” She has also been named to the Forbes “100 Most Powerful Women” list and as the Fortune “Most Powerful Woman in Food and Drink.”

This event was made possible through support from Citi.

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