The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) has welcomed Juliette Majot as their new president. Majot’s life has been dedicated to environmental activism since, as a teenager, she helped to successfully block the building of a nuclear reactor near her home town on Lake Michigan. Following her graduation with a degree in management from Purdue University, she worked for Friends of the Earth U.S. and later the U.K. branch. She worked for San Francisco’s International Rivers where she collaborated with local, national and international organizations to end the environmental and economic destruction of large river projects such as dams in South America. She also helped expose the World Bank and International Monetary Fund with the campaign “Fifty Years Is Enough.” She has been an independent consultant for many organizations including Oxfam America, Pesticide Action Network, Friends of the Earth International, and the Ford Foundation.
As IATP’s new president, Majot will be working to solve and develop food and agricultural policy, rural development and global governance dilemmas. She calls these problems a “constellation” of “causes of human suffering and environmental degradation.” Majot was attracted to IATP for its depth and breadth of understanding this web. She believes it is IATP’s responsibility to find the common ground between the interests of U.S. farmers and farmers abroad in order to positively influence agricultural policy.
