Robert Paarlberg

Robert Paarlberg is an associate at Harvard’s Weatherhead Center and also an associate in the Sustainability Science Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. He has been an adjunct professor of public policy at the Kennedy School and is emeritus professor of political science at Wellesley College. He received his PhD in international relations from Harvard University, and his research focus is on international food and agricultural policy. He is the author of six university press books, including one on agricultural technology in Africa (Starved for Science, Harvard University Press, 2008), another on America’s over-consumption of both food and fuel (The United States of Excess, Oxford, 2015), and more recently a 2021 book from Knopf titled Resetting the Table: Straight Talk About the Food we Grow and Eat (a Nautilus Book Award winner in 2022). Paarlberg has been a member of the Board of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the National Research Council of the National Academies, and the board of directors of Winrock International. He has worked in 15 different countries in Africa as a consultant to the International Food Policy Research Institute, USAID, the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Aspen Institute, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and is currently researching livelihood protection in west Africa under the threat of climate change, with a grant from Harvard’s new Salata Institute. He recently chaired the independent steering committee for a CGIAR research program, Agriculture for Nutrition and Health (A4NH). On six different occasions he has testified to Congress.
The third edition of Paarlberg’s 2010 OUP book, Food Politics: What Everyone Needs to Know, was published in September 2023.
He lives in Watertown, MA, with his wife Marianne.