Ertharin Cousin currently serves as the CEO and Managing Director of Food Systems for the Future, a nutrition impact investment fund; a Distinguished Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; a Bosch Academy, Robert Weizsäcker Fellow; and as a Visiting Scholar at the Stanford University, Center on Food Security and Environment. 

From 2012 until 2017, Cousin led the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). As Executive Director, Cousin guided the 14,000-member WFP team feeding more than 80 million people each year; while she identified and championed longer-term, more sustainable solutions for global food insecurity and hunger. 

In 2009, Cousin was nominated and confirmed as the US Ambassador to the UN Agencies for Food and Agriculture in Rome. Prior to her global hunger work, Cousin helped lead the U.S. domestic fight to end hunger including service as the Executive Vice President and Chief Operating Officer of America’s Second Harvest – now Feeding America. 

Cousin is currently a member of the Bayer AG Supervisory Board, the Mondelez International Board of Directors, the Royal DSM Sustainability Board, and a Trustee of the African agriculture thinktank Academia2063. 

Cousin is a graduate of the University of Illinois at Chicago; the University of Georgia Law School and the University of Chicago Executive Management Program-Finance for Non-Financial Executives. She has been listed numerous times on the Forbes 100 Most Powerful Women List, as the Fortune Most Powerful Woman in Food and Drink, on Time’s 100 Most Influential People list, and as one of the 500 Most Powerful People on the Planet by Foreign Policy magazine.

Dan Glickman is a well-recognized leader in the fields of agriculture, nutrition, hunger, bipartisan politics, and public policy following a long career in the federal government, advocacy, the private sector, and non-profit arenas. 

Glickman is a senior counselor and chair of the International Advisory Board at APCO Worldwide and is a long-time board member and former lead director and Chair of the Governance Committee of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME Group), senior advisor to the U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, and recent past chairman. He is a distinguished fellow in Global Food and Agriculture at The Chicago Council on Global Affairs and an adjunct professor at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy in Boston. Glickman also serves as a senior fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center, a D.C- based think tank that fosters bipartisanship; and a strategic advisor and counselor at The Russell Group.

The first-time author has written his memoir, Laughing at Myself; my Education in Congress, on the Farm and at the Movies, published by the University of Kansas Press in 2021.

Glickman has been actively engaged in promoting bipartisanship in the U.S. Congress, retiring as vice president of the Aspen Institute and executive director of its Congressional Program in early 2021 after 10 years. The program is a public policy education and civility building program for members of the U.S. Congress.

He was a board member of the American Cancer Society Action Network; the domestic anti-hunger group Food Research and Action Center; Issue One, a cross partisan political reform group; World Food Program-USA; past chairman and now board member of the Foundation for Food and Agriculture Research. He is also a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. He serves on the Advisory Boards of Francis Renewable Energy, an electric vehicle charging company, and Good Meat, a subsidiary of Eat Just, a cellular based meat company.

Glickman served as the U.S. Secretary of Agriculture from March 1995 until January 2001 in the Clinton Administration. While at USDA, Glickman oversaw the administration of farm and conservation programs, Meat and poultry food safety and related inspection programs, global trade in food and agriculture, civil rights enforcement impacting employees and other stakeholders, and the US Forest Service. Before his appointment as Secretary of Agriculture, he served for 18 years in the U.S. House of Representatives for the 4th Congressional District of Kansas. While in Congress, he was a senior Member of the House Agriculture committee and chair of the subcommittee on general farm commodities, the House Judiciary Committee and chairman of the subcommittee on Administrative Law and Government relations chairman of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence; and was a leading congressional expert on general aviation policy. 

He served as chairman of the Motion Picture Association of America, Inc. (MPAA) from 2004 until 2010. Prior to joining the MPAA, he was the director of the Harvard Kennedy School Institute of Politics. 

Before his election to Congress in 1976, Glickman served as president of the Wichita, Kansas School Board; was a partner in the law firm of Sargent, Klenda and Glickman; and worked as a trial attorney at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. He received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Michigan, and a J.D. degree from The George Washington University. In recognition of his service, Glickman has also received an honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Kansas State University and an honorary Doctor of Laws from The George Washington University Law School.

Peter Ceretti covers cross-cutting, global themes such as the geopolitics of food security, trade, and sanctions for multinational corporate and financial clients. He began his career in political risk consulting as a researcher on Eurasia Group’s Europe team, where he covered Italian politics during the country’s 2011-2013 sovereign debt crisis. Pete has since worked as a political analyst and economic forecaster, focused on southern Europe and the broader EU at the Economist Intelligence Unit and Teneo Intelligence. Pete earned a bachelor’s degree in international relations and Italian studies from the University of Pennsylvania and a master’s degree in European political economy from the London School of Economics and Political Science.