Dr. Jason Clay, the Executive Director of the Markets Institute at the World Wildlife Fund.
Jason is the author of 15 books, more than 300 articles and 700 invited presentations. His most recent books are World Agriculture and the Environment, and Exploring the Links between International Business and Poverty Reduction: A Case Study of Unilever in Indonesia. In addition to his role at WWF, Jason is National Geographic's first ever Food and Sustainability Fellow. He also won a 2012 James Beard Award for his work on global food sustainability.
Jason is a superb and recognized global thinker, and an expert on environmentally sound agriculture, sustainable supply chains, and the protection of human rights through ecological practices. He is a deeply committed practitioner, a researcher and prolific writer having published influential books and many precedent setting policy reports. His collective work has had a profound influence on governments, corporations, NGOs, and activists.
His current work with the World Wildlife Fund focuses on lessening the negative impact of global industries, large scale agrobusiness, aquaculture, and disruptive supply chains on deforestation, environmental degradation, and worker poverty.
He is noted for his distinctive extraordinarily effective consultation with Fortune 500 companies, focusing on sourcing, accountable and metric-driven corporate social responsibility, and responsiveness to the ecological pressures of global food systems.
He characterizes his role as that of an “extrapreneur,” who creates innovative and impactful relationships between diverse organizations and communities.
Jason has been a friend and colleague for decades. I had the honor of being his best man at his wedding.
I first met him in 1987 when he was a researcher and advocate at Cultural Survival, a human rights organization defending disadvantaged indigenous peoples globally, and helping to integrate them equitably into world markets.
He has helped me create the rationale for what became the Institute. He served on its first Advisory Board, and some of early themes that we explored were deliberate outcomes of his thinking, such as 1993’s Militarization of the Third World, which resulted from his work in Africa.
He is one of the most resourceful and intellectually provocative thinkers I know, and his intellectual impact at both the personal and systemic level is indisputable. Though a visionary, he is a very tactical and tangible results-driven person.
He writes powerfully about how coming from an impoverished farming background to learn and then teach at Harvard and Yale, he understands the challenges of overcoming poverty and the dilemmas of agriculture, climate, and sustainability.
Jason is tremendously thoughtful and his criticism, always meeting the full measure of constructive feedback and inclusivity. Strong-minded, he is nonetheless both flexible and very self-critical.
He is a man of disciplined passion, and rarely have I met someone who better fits the description “suffering no fools.” His intelligent voice and prescient warnings need to be resonated, and his advice heeded. As it often is.
"I learned early on that I needed to find a job that I was passionate about and that would make me feel good. While I got a PhD and was expected to teach in a university, I never really wanted that life. That said, I have taught at Harvard and Yale. What I have always been most excited about was being on the cutting edge of change and helping improve the lives of others.
Since childhood, I benefited so much from the support of others. It has always seemed only natural that I needed to pay it forward—not help those who had helped me but help those who had similar backgrounds to my own and needed a hand. My entire education was paid for by scholarships, grants and what I earned at the time. I had a total debt of only $500 for nine years of education. It was important for me to obtain an education without incurring a huge debt.
To this day, I have only applied for one job. After I got it, I turned it down. I have either created jobs for myself or have been asked if I would be interested in working with others I know and respect to do something that could benefit either people or the planet.
Jason on his work!
My career has focused on two key areas—human rights work with indigenous people (e.g. Native Americans or indigenous groups in Africa, Asia, Latin America and the Middle East) with a group called Cultural Survival based in Cambridge, MA and environmental work with the World Wildlife Fund-US based in Washington, DC.
Through a 45-year career, I have not only attempted to achieve results on my own, but also influence the strategies of others. Toward this end, I have:
• Worked in 80 countries, including 15 in any given year.
• Given more than 800 talks, with more than 70-80 talks per year at this point. One talk alone reached more than 700 million people through a Reuters article what went viral.
• Given one of the most influential TED talks with millions of viewers.
• Generated more than 3,000 news clips about my issues, solutions and work.
• Wrote 20 books and more than 500 articles, pieces, blogs, etc.
• Raised more than $500 million to reduce human rights abuses, support poverty reduction programs, and reduce key environmental impacts.
• Helped raise more than $5 billion for other institutions to address the same issues.
Here are a some of the main accomplishments of my career.
Human Rights—Giving a Voice to Those Who Aren’t Heard, 1980s and 1990s
• First to demonstrate that human rights violations could be predicted by showing the links between ethnicity, refugees, famine, armed conflict and the control of natural resources. Developed a database of 6,500 indigenous groups and their territories that is used by the US War College to predict armed conflicts.
• Proved that reliable, replicable research could be undertaken within refugee camps on the causes of refugee flows. More than $1 million was spent to discredit my research in Central America and Africa, but it withstood the challenges and generated credible data that changed US (as well as other countries’) policies towards Ethiopia, Guatemala, Mozambique, Sudan and Uganda.
• Proved that “victims” viewpoints (whether indigenous people, ethnic minorities, famine victims, refugees or displaced people) are no less credible than those of government officials, researchers, aid agency personnel, journalists or others.
• Documented the misuse of famine assistance in 1986 and redirected $2 billion of famine assistance to Ethiopia in 1985-86.
• Drafted the World Bank policy on tribal people for Africa.
• Founded and edited the award winning Cultural Survival Quarterly, 1980-1992, which generated $1 million per year of core support for the non-profit.
Rainforest Marketing—Proving the Value of Rainforests in the Marketplace
In 1988, established a trading company (with loans from US AID and the MacArthur Foundation for a company within an NGO) to buy and sell rainforest products.
• Founded the first Environmental/Fairtrade product certification program in the US.
• Created Rainforest Crunch ice cream flavor with Ben and Jerry’s (as well as Chubby Hubby) and more than 200 other products with 50 other companies.
• Generated sales in the US, Europe and Japan of more than $100 million per year.
• Leveraged more than $1 billion in assistance from foundations and multi-lateral and bi-lateral organizations to help local groups and their donors undertake similar work.
• Generated media coverage in more than 1,500 outlets over 4 years for rainforest conservation and rainforest marketing efforts.
• Featured as a Harvard Business School case.
Commodities—Reducing the Impact of Producing Food and Fiber
Since the 1990s, I have focused on drivers of deforestation—agriculture, cattle ranching, and mining; and developed strategies to halt deforestation that included governments as well as key private sector actors.
• Identified the impacts of producing 21 key agricultural commodities and what is known about measurably reducing those impacts.
• Identified the key impacts of producing the 13 fastest-growing aquaculture industries as well as how to reduce them to acceptable levels.
• Identified the 25 most significant minerals reshaping our planet in the 21st Century.
• Convened 8 global groups to agree on key impacts of commodity production, identify measurable indicators, and adopt performance standards. Each group includes producers, companies, researchers and NGOs. Each group includes retailers who represent 5-15% of global production.
Supply Chain Management
Since 2000, have focused on helping companies understand how they can use their supply chains to improve the quality of the products they purchase, reduce their negative impacts, and reinforce their “license to operate” in developing countries.
• Developing ‘carbon neutral food” beginning with payments for carbon sequestration in tree crops and for sugarcane that is harvested without burning.
• Advised Coca-Cola, Unilever and Mars about how to incorporate carbon payments into their product sourcing to comply with the Kyoto Protocol.
• Worked with Tabasco and Cadbury to purchase ingredients from landless producers and use forward contracting to help them obtain loans with contracts as collateral.
• Advised Mars on supporting tree planting to offset their carbon footprint while improving the quality of the cocoa they purchase.
• Worked with Unilever to develop carbon sequestration payment systems to cover 30% of the cost of planting new oil-seed, tree crops.
Corporate Responsibility
The power for change is increasingly with the private sector. What is less clear is that improving their performance regarding the environment or poverty, actually makes companies more profitable.
• Oversaw the first study of the impact of a multi-national food company on poor people in a single country, looking at Unilever in Indonesia.
• With WWF, the Calvert Group, Inter-American Development Bank, and the MacArthur Foundation, launched the first ever, $20 M investment fund to help small-scale producers and workers buy equity in downstream agricultural processing operations.
• Evaluated 15 different worker-owned agriculture operations in Brazil to determine which might be relevant models to guide World Bank investments."