Ruben Echeverría has worked on food, agriculture, and rural development issues -with emphasis on international agricultural innovation- since the early 1980s. Ruben Echeverría is Director General Emeritus of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT-CGIAR) based in Cali, Colombia. He led CIAT from 2009 to 2019 expanding operations into Africa and Asia and in 2019 promoted the creation of the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT. During 2020 and 2021, Echeverría was chair of the Global Commission on Sustainable Agricultural Intensification and senior advisor on Agricultural and Rural Innovation to the FAO Latin America and the Caribbean regional office. During that time, he was also a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) based in Washington DC. Ruben G. Echeverría is also a senior advisor for agricultural development for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
In the mid-2000s, Ruben Echeverría was the executive director of the Science Council of the CGIAR based at FAO in Rome. He worked in agricultural, environmental and rural development transformation for more than a decade at the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) in Washington, DC where he prepared several multimillion-dollar projects and led the creation of the Inter-Agency Group for Rural Development and the Regional Fund for Agricultural Technology (FONTAGRO). In the late 1980s he worked on agricultural research policy issues and strengthening national research capacities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, based at the International Service for National Agricultural Research (ISNAR) in The Hague, Netherlands.
As part of his PhD thesis, he conducted field research based at the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) in Mexico. He studied Agronomy at the University of Uruguay (BSc) and Agriculture Economics at the University of Minnesota, USA (MSc and PhD) with special emphasis on the economics of technical and institutional change.
He has been a member of the Steering Committee of the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN) of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) since October 2021.
He is a national of Uruguay.
