Catherine Bertini

American public servant

Catherine Bertini is an American public servant. She is the 2003 World Food Prize Laureate. She was the Executive Director of the United Nations World Food Program from 1992 to 2002. She served as the UN Under Secretary for Management from 2003 to 2005. Currently she is a distinguished fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, the Chair of the Board of the Global Alliance for Improved Nutrition (GAIN) and the Chair of the Executive Board of the Crop Trust.

Bertini was born in Syracuse, New York in 1950. She earned a bachelor's degree in political science from the State University of New York at Albany. At Albany, Bertini was president of the College Republicans and worked full time in the last gubernatorial campaign of Nelson A. Rockefeller. For five years after college, she held positions in the Republican Party as a youth director in New York State and for the Republican National Committee, and as a congressional campaign manager for George Wortley (R Syracuse). In 1982, she ran for US Congress herself in the 9th District of Illinois.

Bertini was appointed in 1992 by the Secretary General of the United Nations and the Director General of the Food and Agriculture Organization, on the recommendation of President George H. W. Bush. In 1997, she was reappointed with the endorsement of President Bill Clinton, together with that of the Group of 77 developing countries and the Executive Board of WFP. As chief executive officer of the organization, Bertini transformed WFP into the world's largest and most responsive humanitarian organization. She is credited with assisting hundreds of millions of victims of wars and natural disasters throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In particular, she was widely praised for her efforts to end famine in North Korea; averting starvation in Afghanistan by delivering enormous amounts of urgently needed food aid in 2001; ensuring the provision of food supplies during the crises in Bosnia and Kosovo; and in 2000, averting the mass starvation that threatened 16 million people in the Horn of Africa. Bertini also led efforts to empower poor women through the use of food aid. In recognition of her leadership at WFP in ending famine and decreasing hunger, she received the World Food Prize, known as the "Nobel Prize for Food and Agriculture" in 2003. She also chaired the UN System Standing Committee on Nutrition and served as the Secretary General's envoy twice: for drought in the Horn of Africa and for humanitarian needs in Gaza and the West Bank. She contributed to the development of the foundation's new agricultural framework, seeking to improve the lives of poor farmers, especially women farmers. She led the first gender initiatives at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Catherine Bertini is a Distinguished Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She helped create and co chaired the Council's Global Agriculture Development Initiative (GADI) from 2008 to 2013. GADI has been an influential voice in US government circles advocating for new priorities for support for poor farmers within international development programs. She also chaired the Council's two Girls in Rural Economies projects, one in 2011 and one in 2018 and co chaired the Council's domestic Agriculture Task Force in 2007 and 2012. She published a report titled "Leading Change in United Nations Organizations", which gives guidance to incoming senior management in the United Nations and advice on leading transformational change.

During the President George H. W. Bush administration, Catherine Bertini served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the Family Support Administration in the United States Department of Health and Human Services, and as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Food and Consumer Services at the United States Department of Agriculture. During the Reagan administration, Bertini was the Director of the Office of Family Assistance at DHHS. She was responsible for regulations that strengthened education and training support for the poorest American women in support of the Family Support Act of 1988.

President George W. Bush appointed and President Barack Obama reappointed her to the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development (BIFAD), where she advised USAID for nine years (2006 2015) on agriculture and higher education issues pertinent to food insecurity in developing countries.

In 2012, Catherine Bertini was named to serve on the State Department's five member Accountability Review Board that examined the facts and circumstances of the attacks on the U. S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

Earlier in her career, Bertini was appointed by Illinois Governor James R. Thompson as a member of the Illinois Human Rights Commission, and as a member of the Illinois State Scholarship Commission.

In 2002, she taught for one semester as Policy Maker in Residence at the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy at the University of Michigan.

In 1986, she taught for one semester as a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University.

Before joining the federal government, she served for ten years in public affairs positions at the Container Corporation of America in Chicago, where she ran its public affairs department, its foundation, and where she created its political action committee. She has also been named a Champion of the 2021 United Nations Food Systems Summit. Concern Worldwide U. S. presented her its Brigid Award in 2010. She is also the recipient of the 2011 Borlaug CAST Communication Award. In 2013, she received the Women Extraordinaire Award from the International Women Associates. Twelve universities in four countries have awarded her honorary degrees.