Dr. Dennis Garrity is a systems agronomist and research leader whose career has been focused on the development of 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 as critical to sustainable land management.
He is a Senior Fellow at the World Resources Institute, and Distinguished Senior Research Fellow at the World Agroforestry (ICRAF) in Nairobi. He served as Director General of the Centre from 2001 to 2011. He is currently focusing on building an African land restoration movement, and is leading an effort to perennialize global agriculture in the 21st Century. He is Chairman 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 on a transformation of African and Asian farming through the integration of trees into farming systems, degraded forest lands, and rangelands. The Alliance is upscaling the practices of evergreen agriculture to tens of millions of the least-favored smallholder farm families in the tropics, and scaling-up evergreen electrical energy solutions for rural communities, with the potential to store vast amounts of carbon while increasing crop production, livelihoods and jobs. He also chairs the Steering Committee for Landcare International, a worldwide effort to support grassroots community-based natural resource management. During the 1980s he led the Agroecology Unit of the International Rice Research Institute, and he initiated and developed the Southeast Asia Programme of the World Agroforestry Centre during the 1990s, while based in Bogor, Indonesia.
He has published more than 200 scientific journal articles, books, popular articles, and policy briefs. He has served as advisor to 34 MSc and PhD students from the Kenya, Philippines, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Burma, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Madagascar, Canada, USA, Germany, and the UK, and has advised eight post-doctoral fellows in the conduct of advanced studies from the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, and Germany. He is a native Ohio, USA. He obtained his BSc degree in agronomy at The Ohio State University, his MSc in farming systems at the University of the Philippines at Los Banos, and his Phd in Agronomy at the University of Nebraska.