Mr. Yurdi Yasmi is the FAO’s Deputy Regional Representative for Africa, a position he has held since 2021. He was appointed as the FAO Representative to Ghana on 21 April 2023. He is performing this function concurrently with his responsibility as Deputy Regional Representative for Africa.

A national of Indonesia, Mr. Yasmi previously worked for the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where he served as the Regional Representative for Southeast Asia. While at IRRI, he was responsible for developing IRRI’s new strategy for the region, supervising country offices and overseeing the portfolios in Southeast Asia.

Mr Yasmi has 25 years of international experience in development and global research institutions. He started his career in 1998 as Research Coordinator at the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) in Bogor, Indonesia. He coordinated CIFOR’s global research program on sustainable forest management in Asia, Africa and Latin America. In 2003, he joined Wageningen University in the Netherlands as a Researcher where he conducted global analysis on forest and nature conflict.

From 2007 to 2010, he served as Senior Program Officer at the Center for People and Forests (RECOFTC) in Bangkok, Thailand, and, in 2010, became the Head and Manager, Capacity Building and Research in the same institution. In 2013, he took the position of the Coordinator of Humidtropics Programme in the Mekong region at the World Agroforestry Centre (ICRAF) in Hanoi, Vietnam, and, later that year, he joined FAO Regional Office for Asia and the Pacific (RAP) in Bangkok, Thailand as Forest Policy Lead and later as Coordinator for Sustainable Agriculture, a position he held for six and half years.

Mr. Yasmi has led multi-million dollar development projects in over twenty countries including in complex political settings e.g. Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Cambodia, Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Nepal, South Pacific, Timor-Leste, etc.

Mr Yasmi holds a Doctor of Philosophy in Forest and Nature Conservation Policy, and a Master of Science in Tropical Forestry from Wageningen University, Netherlands, as well as a Bachelor of Science in Forest Management from Bogor Agricultural University (Institute Pertanian Bogor) in Indonesia. He has published over seventy research articles, books and book chapters. See here

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