Ertharin Cousin
About the Speaker
Ambassador Ertharin Cousin
Ertharin Cousin is a Distinguished Fellow of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University Center on Food Security and Environment. .
From 2012 until 2017 Cousin served as the 12th executive director of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), guiding the world’s largest humanitarian organization with 14,000 staff serving 80 million beneficiaries in 75 countries meeting urgent food needs.
In 2009, Cousin was nominated by then President Obama and confirmed by the Senate as the U.S. Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome. In this role Cousin served as the U.S. Representative for all food, agriculture and nutrition related issues. Cousin helped identify and catalyze US government investment in food security and nutrition activities supported by the USAID Feed the Future program.
Prior to her global hunger work, Cousin helped lead the U.S. domestic fight to end hunger while serving as executive vice president and chief operating officer of America’s Second Harvest, now Feeding America.
Previously, Cousin served as senior vice president for Albertson’s Foods, during which time she was appointed by then President Bill Clinton to the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development where she helped oversee U.S. government agriculture research investments worldwide. Before Albertson’s, Cousin served as the White House liaison to the State Department, where she received the department’s Meritorious Service award for her work during the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta.
A Chicago native, Cousin is a 1979 graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago, a 1982 gradaute of the University of Georgia Law School and an alumnus of the University of Chicago Executive Management Finance for Non-Financial Executives program. She has been listed numerous times on the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women List, as the Fortune Most Powerful Woman in Food and Drink, on Time’s 100 Most Influential People list, and as one of the 500 Most Powerful People on the Planet by Foreign Policy magazine.