Eric Holt Giménez

Eric Holt Giménez is an agroecologist, political economist, lecturer and author. From 1975 to 2002 he worked in Mexico, Central America and South Africa in sustainable agricultural development. During this time he helped to start the Campesino a Campesino (Farmer to Farmer) Movement. He returned to the U.S. twice during this period: once for his M.Sc. in international agricultural development (UC Davis, 1981) and then for his Ph.D. in environmental studies (UC Santa Cruz, 2002). His dissertation research was the basis for his first book Campesino a Campesino: Voices from the farmer-to-farmer movement for sustainable agriculture in Latin America. After receiving his Ph.D. with an emphasis in agroecology and political economy, he taught as a university lecturer at UC Santa Cruz and Boston University in the International Honors Program in Global Ecology. He gives yearly courses of food systems transformation and social movements in Italy in the Masters program of the University of Gastronomic Sciences in Pollenzo (slow food) and in the doctoral program at the Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín, Colombia. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The Herald Tribune, Le Monde Diplomatique, La Jornada and The Des Moines Register. He has a blog on the Huffington Post.

In 2004–2006, he was the Latin America program co-ordinator for the Bank Information Center in Washington, D.C. His seminal work, Land-Gold-Reform: The Territorial Restructuring of the Guatemalan Highlands (published in English, Spanish and Portuguese), links the struggle against extractive industries with the struggle for land in Latin America and is a product of this experience. In June 2006, he was hired as the executive director of Food First (the Institute for Food and Development Policy), a people's think tank started by Frances Moore Lappé in 1975. He specializes in environmental studies, area studies, development studies, agroecology and the political economy of hunger. He works closely with social movements in the U.S. and internationally and asserts that, "Successful social movements are formed by integrating activism with livelihoods. These integrated movements create the deep sustained social pressure that produces political will—the key to changing the financial, governmental, and market structures that presently work against sustainability."[1] Walden Bello is a particular advocate of the importance of Gimenez's work, referring to him as one of the world's most "prominent critics of the global food system".[2]