Two new members WOTRO Executive Board

7 september 2009

With effect from 1 September 2009, the Governing Board of NWO has appointed two new members to the WOTRO Executive Board. They are Prof. E (Eric) Smaling and Prof. E (Erwin) Bulte. Prof. W. (Willem) van Genugten has been reappointed as chair of the Executive Board.

Between 1984 and 1988, Eric Smaling worked in several West African countries and in Kenya (2.5 years) in the field of soil survey for sustainable use of wetlands, and on the development of a framework for soil-specific fertilizer recommendations respectively. Later on, he was Head of Section of Development Cooperation at DLO-Winand Staring Centre, programme leader 'North-South' for all DLO institutes, and member of a task force 'internationalisering' in Wageningen University and Research Centre.

In 1998, he was appointed professor of Soil Inventorization and Land Evaluation at Wageningen University. In September 2004, twenty years after he left, he joined ITC again as a 2 days per week Professor in Sustainable Agriculture. The rest of his time he spends in the Dutch Senate, as a writer of children's books, and occasionally as a free-lance consultant for organizations such as World Bank and FAO.

Erwin Bulte obtained his PhD in 1997 at Wageningen University and the Netherlands Network of Economics (NAKE) in environmental economics. He started his career at Tilburg University. In 2005 he was appointed as Professor of Environmental and Natural Resource Economics at this university. One year later, he also became Professor of Development Economics at Wageningen University.

Since 2005 Erwin Bulte is senior advisor to the Agricultural and Development Economics Division (ESA) at the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). That year he was also appointed by the University of Cambridge as a senior research fellow of the Department of Land Economy. Furthermore, Erwin Bulte is board member at SOW-VU, a research institute that provides support to the formulation of food and agricultural policies and policies aiming at poverty reduction.

Willem van Genugten is professor of International Law at Tilburg University and is Chair of the standing advisory committee on human rights of the Dutch government (part of the Advisory Council on International Affairs) and of the board of Netherlands School of Human Rights Research.

Prof. Van Genugten wrote an impressive range of books and articles on a variety of development issues such as poverty and human rights, developments in international economic law, and the rights of indigenous peoples.

The views of van Genugten concerning ‘science for development’ are fully in line with the WOTRO strategy. Van Genugten considers that it is in the interest of the developing countries themselves as well as the world as a whole to give all due attention to problems of developing countries, be it in the field of poverty and hunger, the non-existence of adequate health care systems, the degradation of the environment, or access to global markets