Joachim von Braun

Joachim von Braun (born July 10, 1950) is a German agricultural scientist and currently director of a department of the Center for Development Research at the University of Bonn and President of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences.

Previously, von Braun was director general of the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.

In the course of his research, he focuses primarily on agricultural policy, bioeconomics, food security, and sustainable resource use.

Joachim von Braun was born on July 10, 1950 Brakel, Westphalia, and studied agricultural sciences at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms University in Bonn from 1970 to 1975.

He received his doctorate in 1978 with a thesis on agricultural labor markets and habilitated afterwards in agricultural economics on food security in developing countries, both at the Georg August University of Göttingen.

From 1983 to 1993, von Braun was a Research Fellow and then Director of the Food Consumption and Nutrition Division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) in Washington DC. In 1993, he came back to Germany to take up the position of Professor (C4) of Food Economics, Food Policy and World Food Issues and Director of the Institute for Food Economics and Consumer Analyses at the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel.

Von Braun was a speaker at the Rio Conference in 1992, the World Food Summits in 1996 and 2002, and the "World Food Forum" of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in Beijing in early December 2007.

After several research stays in Africa, Russia, and China, von Braun was appointed founding director of the Center for Development Research (ZEF) at the University of Bonn in 1997.

In 2002, Braun returned to Washington became director of IFPRI.

In 2009, he returned to the Center for Development Research (ZEF) at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn as director and took over the professorship for economic and technological change.

Since July 2019, von Braunhas also served as co-spokesperson and co-coordinator of the Transdisciplinary Research Area "Innovation and Technology for a Sustainable Future" in the Excellence Initiative of the University of Bonn.

In addition to numerous reports on the world food situation in recent years, von Braun's works include studies on food security, the economics of famine, technical progress, agricultural trade policy, rural financial systems and environmental policy.

In 2020, he was appointed by the United Nations to chair the Scientific Group of the UN Food Systems Summit 2021.

Von Braun has been: