James Garrett

James Garrett is a Senior Scientist at the Alliance of CIAT and Bioversity. He works on policies and programs at the nexus of food, agriculture, and nutrition. He has degrees in political science, public policy, and applied economics. James has done field work in Latin America, Africa, and Asia, and lived in various countries in Latin America as well as in Mozambique.

Previously, at IFPRI, he led research programs on urban food and nutrition security, urban-rural transformation, and policy processes for food security and nutrition. In secondments, he has worked as a senior economist for global nutrition at the World Bank and at IFAD to support its efforts to mainstream nutrition into agricultural projects. Working with FAO, he led the development of their first nutrition strategy, and working with IFAD he led the development of their first nutrition plan. He assisted WFP in developing perspectives on how to apply a food systems lens to programming.

As part of the the CGIAR Research Program Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH),he served as a facilitator to the UN Rome-based agencies (RBAs), serving as the CGIAR representative to the CFS Working Group on Nutrition and also to UN Nutrition. He is keenly interested closing the gap between research and policy, and program impact. He is currently working with WFP, UNN, and IFAD on a project that looks at how development organizations use knowledge, especially research, in their work. The project also looks at how agriculture can improve nutrition through a set of impact evaluations, operation evaluations, and cost-effectiveness studies. He also working now on projects looking at inclusive governance and food systems and food system transformation in Bangladesh.