Robert Paarlberg
Lecture Title: Foodies vs. Aggies: Compromise for a New Food System
About the speaker
Robert Paarlberg is Adjunct Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School, a Visiting Professor at Harvard College, and an Associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center. From 1976 until 2015 he was Professor of Political Science at Wellesley College. He received his B.A. from Carleton College and earned a PhD in International Relations from Harvard University. He is the author of six university press books, including most recently Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford 2013) and The United States of Excess: Gluttony, and the Dark Side of American Exceptionalism (Oxford 2015). His 2008 book from Harvard University Press was titled Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept out of Africa, and had a foreword co-authored by President Jimmy Carter and Norman Borlaug.
Paarlberg has been a member of the Board of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the National Research Council of the National Academies, and was a member of the Board of Directors of Winrock International. He has been a frequent consultant to the International Food Policy Research Institute, USAID, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Aspen Institute, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. On half a dozen occasions he has testified to Congress, and he currently chairs the Independent Steering Committee for the CGIAR research program on Agriculture for Nutrition and Health. Paarlberg is also a former legislative aide in the United States Senate and a former Lieutenant in the United States Navy. Paarlberg’s father, Don Paarlberg, was a prominent agricultural economist who grew up on a farm in Indiana.