David Hegwood

I have been professionally engaged in international food and agricultural policy for 25 years.  My professional experience includes nearly 20 years of service with the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Washington, Brussels and Rome.  I also worked for the California Department of Food and Agriculture, served a brief stint with the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee, and spent a few years as a private sector consultant advising clients on international trade and environmental negotiations.

I founded Feeding Ten Billion in April 2009 after returning from 4 years in Rome serving as the USDA representative to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.  The idea for this forum grew out of a cascade of realizations about the complexity of hunger, our global interdependence for food security, and the sobering assessment that even if we could end hunger throughout the world tomorrow, we still face tremendous challenges in feeding the world in the coming decades.