Prabhu Pingali

My journey in the 50 years after HPS

It’s been fifty years since I graduated from the Hyderabad Public School, but it seems like it was only yesterday. My memories of our cloistered lives in boarding school, our teachers and our friends are still very fresh, and I still feel nostalgic, and also very proud every time I drive by the school during my visits to Hyderabad. I am what I am today because of what I learned and experienced at HPS. I learned how to be a confident public speaker, an effective debater, a dramatic performer (although I did not build on it), and a leader (from my stint as the Head boy). These skills helped shape my life as much as, and perhaps more than the grades that I got.

I went on to study Economics at the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) in Pilani, Rajasthan, but for the first few years was not sure about what I wanted to do. It was during a summer internship at ICRISAT that I realized that my true passion was in addressing the problems of hunger and rural poverty. Since that summer in 1976, I have been deeply committed to studying the problems of food, agriculture, and rural development in developing countries. After completing a PhD in Economics from North Carolina State University, I joined the World Bank’s Agricultural & Rural Development Department in Washington, D.C., 1982. During my five years at the Bank, I traveled extensively across sub-Saharan Africa studying the problems of food insecurity in the continent. I then moved onto spending nine years in the Philippines and six years in Mexico, working with international agricultural research organizations, helping improve food production systems in Asia and Latin America. In 2002, I became the Director of the Economics Department of the United Nations’ Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) in Rome, a position in which I could help translate research into actionable policies for developing countries. In 2008 I moved back to the United States, to join the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and to help setup the Agricultural Division that provides funding for improving food security and poverty reduction in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. I made my current, and what could be my final, career move in 2013, as a Professor of Applied Economics at Cornell University, and the Founding Director of the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition. In my current roles, I continue to devote myself to the quest for finding lasting & sustainable solutions to the problems of global hunger and poverty, but with an emphasis on teaching and mentoring young scholars that can carry the work forward.