Dr. Dennis Garrity is a systems agronomist and research leader whose career has focused on improving small-scale farming systems in the tropics. He has been serving as Drylands Ambassador for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification, emphasizing the role of agroforestry, evergreen agriculture and landcare for sustainable land management. From 2001 to 2011, he served as Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre.
He is currently Chair of the Board of the Global EverGreening Alliance, a partnership of nearly all of the major development and conservation organizations around the world, working together to restore hundreds of millions of hectares of degraded land and enhance the livelihoods of millions of the least-favored smallholder farm families in the tropics. He also chaired Landcare International from 2005 to 2020, a worldwide effort to support grassroots community-based natural resource management, and currently is a member of the Board of Global Landcare.
During the 1990s he was based in Indonesia where he launched and developed the Southeast Asia Regional Programme of ICRAF. As Head of the Farming Systems Program at the International Rice Research Institute and as a Professor at the University of the Philippines during the 1980s, he advised 47 PhD and MSc students and post-doctoral fellows from Africa, Asia, Europe and the US. He has published over 175 journal articles and books. Dr. Garrity has a BSc degree in agriculture from The Ohio State University, an MSc in agronomy from the University of the Philippines at Los Baños, and a PhD in crop physiology from the University of Nebraska.
