A U.S. Naval War College Lecture of Opportunity from Jan. 27, 2021.
Food Security and COVID 19 with Mr. Gregory Collins, Deputy Assistant Administrator, Bureau for Resilience and Food Security and USAID Resilience Coordinator.
About this Lecture of Opportunity
Efforts to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 have resulted in more than 100 million people backsliding into poverty and hunger and pushed an additional 25 million to crisis levels of hunger. The impacts are also projected to be worse in 2021 and long-lasting, exacerbating both inequality and already concerning trends caused by conflict and climate change. In this talk, Dr. Collins will outline the impact pathways that have resulted in these dire outcomes, as well as the near and long-term solutions needed to mitigate these impacts and speed recovery, including the centrality of resilience for international development in the face of the triple threat of COVID, climate and conflict.
This talk is led by the Climate and Human Security Studies Group
Greg Collins is the Deputy Assistant Administrator in the USAID Bureau for Resilience and Food Security, which leads the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future. In this role, he oversees strategic direction and implementation of Feed the Future programs in the field, the initiative’s agriculture, research and policy efforts, and the USAID Center for Resilience. He also serves as the Agency’s Resilience Coordinator. Greg Collins formerly served as the Director of the USAID Center for Resilience. Collins is a recognized global thought leader on resilience and has played a lead role in developing and operationalizing a strategic vision for resilience at USAID.
Collins was based in Kenya during the 2011 drought emergency there and helped lead the development of USAID’s Horn of Africa resilience strategy in 2012. He also helped lead the development of USAID’s Sahel resilience strategy in 2012-13. He continues to provide strategic guidance and technical support on resilience to missions in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, including the Agency flagship resilience portfolios in Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Uganda, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali and Nepal.
Prior to coming to USAID in 2010, Collins worked for more than a decade as a strategy and technical advisor on food security, monitoring and evaluation, and vulnerability assessment and analysis to various UN agencies (FAO, WFP, UNICEF) and NGOs in east and southern Africa and the Middle East.
Collins holds an MPH from Tulane University with a specialization in food security and monitoring and evaluation, and a PhD in Economic Sociology from the University of California Davis where his research explored Somalia’s telecommunications industry as an instance of development (and resilience) "without state."
