Ruben Echeverría has 40 years of professional experience in agricultural innovation in the global south. His area of work has focused on agricultural technical and institutional change, food policies, capacity building of national agricultural and extension systems, monitoring and evaluation and management of agricultural research for development. He worked for twenty years in rural development. He is currently based at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI-CGIAR), in Washington DC and is actively working with FAO in Latin America and the Caribbean developing a technology and digital innovation regional agenda. He chairs the Global Commission on Sustainable Agriculture Intensification (CoSAI) and the Scientific Advisory Board of the Catalan Institute of Agri-food Research & Technology (IRTA).
He was board chair of a well-recognized Latin American rural development think tank (RIMISP) for more than a decade. He is an Emeritus Director General of the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT-CGIAR) where he worked for a decade. He was Executive Director of the Science Council of the CGIAR, based at FAO in Rome where he was involved in identifying global agricultural research for development priorities working with all centres of the CGIAR and their partners.
He is a member of the Steering Committee of the High Level Panel of Experts on Food Security and Nutrition (HLPE-FSN) since 2022.
He worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) in Washington, D.C. where he was engaged in agriculture and rural development project preparation and strategy development with field experience in more than twenty countries in Latin America. He was head of extension at the Uruguayan land reform institute. He studied agronomy in Uruguay and agricultural economics in the US.
