Mr. Máximo Torero Cullen
Assistant Director-General, Economic and Social Development Department of FAO
Maximo Torero is Assistant Director General for economic and social development at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations in Rome.
Before joining FAO, he served at the World Bank Group as Executive Director for Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru and Uruguay. He led the Markets, Trade and Institutions Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington, D.C. He is a Professor at the University of the Pacific, Perú (on leave) and Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at University of Bonn, Germany.
He has published more than 40 peer-reviewed academic articles analyzing poverty, inequality and behavioral economics in top journals – including in Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometric Theory, American Economic Journal: Applied Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics and Journal of Labor Economics. Specifically, he has studied the role of infrastructure, institutions and technology on poverty reduction, and the importance of geography, infrastructure access and assets in explaining poverty. He is the author of 14 books, including Food Price Volatility and its Implications for Food Security and Policy and Innovations for Inclusive Value Chain Development: Successes and Challenges.
He has led several research programs and impact evaluations. For example, he led the impact evaluation of the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s $450 million-investment in El Salvador’s Northern Transnational Highway and rural electrification to increase access to markets.
Torero received the Chevalier de l’Ordre du Mérite Agricole from the French government for exceptional contribution to agriculture. The Global Development Network awarded him twice for outstanding research on development. His work has been cited in numerous media outlets, including CNN, BBC, The Economist and The New York Times. He has a Ph.D. in economics from University of California, Los Angeles, and a B.S. from University of the Pacific in Peru.