Social media and webcasting: Participants are encouraged to share their ideas, views and insights via social media channels using #agtalks hashtag. The virtual audience may follow the proceedings and interact with the prominent guests on the social media channels listed below and via webcasting.

Reminder!  The AgTalks Inaugural Session will take place tomorrow, Wednesday 1 October, from 9:30 a.m to 12:30 at IFAD headquarters.  Please confirm your participation to protocol@ifad.org.

The inaugural session will benefit from the insights and experience of:

Chris Davis works for Fairtrade International, and is currently involved in the reorganization and devolution of producer services to make services more accountable and relevant to the 1.4 million farmers and workers involved in Fairtrade. He was previously Producer Partnerships Director at the Fairtrade Foundation, the organization behind the FAIRTRADE Mark in the UK, with sales of £1.8 billion in retail value, providing increasing opportunities for famers, workers and their families to benefit from terms of trade that support development. Previously he worked for the UK’s Department for International Development, including a four-year secondment to the South African Government assisting delivery of national poverty alleviation programmes. Davis founded a number of small businesses dealing with fair and ethical trading before joining the Fairtrade movement in 2006.

Andrew Rugasira is the founder and CEO of Good African Coffee, a Uganda-based social enterprise that brings quality coffees, roasted and packed at source, to the global market. Good African Coffee was the first African-owned coffee brand to be listed in supermarkets in the United Kingdom. It works with a supply network of more than 14,000 coffee farmers in western Uganda. The company has also developed 17 savings and credit cooperatives for farming communities. Prior to founding Good African Coffee, Rugasira was CEO of VR Promotions Ltd, Uganda’s leading promotion and events management company. He is also chairman of Eastern African Fine Coffees Association (EAFCA), a member of Uganda’s Presidential Investor Roundtable, and sits on the board of Maisha Film Lab. He is the author of A Good African Story: How a Small Company Built a Global Coffee Brand. In 2007, he was nominated by the World Economic Forum as a Young Global Leader.

Gunnar Rundgren is founder and Senior Consultant of Grolink AB. In 1977 he started a pioneer organic farm and since then he has worked with most parts of the organic farmer sector – from farming to policy. He has founded several organizations for organic agriculture in Sweden, including KRAV, where he was the director, and has worked for several United Nations agencies and development organizations including the World Bank. Since 2009, he has devoted increasing time to writing and speaking about wider food, agricultural and social developments. He has published several books about the major social and environmental challenges of our world, food and farming.

Ndongo Samba Sylla is a Senegalese development economist. He has previously worked as a technical advisor to the Presidency of the Republic of Senegal. He is currently a Research and Programme Manager at the West Africa office of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation (Dakar). His publications cover topics such as fair trade, labour markets in developing countries, social movements and democratic theory. He recently published The Fair Trade Scandal: Marketing Poverty to Benefit the Rich.