Jason Clay

Jason Clay leads the work of WWF-US on Markets and how companies manage supply chains and the Markets Institute whose goal is to identify and create awareness about global issues and trends on the horizon for food and soft commodities and then build consensus about how to best anticipate them. Dr. Clay launched WWF’s work on agriculture, livestock, aquaculture, finance and reshaped our work with the private sector and on fisheries. During his career he has worked on a family farm and in the U.S. Department of Agriculture; taught at Harvard and Yale; and spent more than 35 years working in human rights and environmental organizations.

In 1988, Dr. Clay invented Rainforest Marketing, one of the first fair-trade ecolabels in the United States, and was responsible for co-creating Rainforest Crunch and more than 200 other products with combined sales of $100 million. From 1999-2003, he co-directed a consortium with WWF, World Bank, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and National Aquaculture Centres of Asia/Pacific to identify the most significant environmental and social impacts of shrimp aquaculture and analyze better management practices that measurably reduce them.

He then co-convened (with the IFC and others) multi-stakeholder roundtables of producers, investors, buyers, researchers and NGOs to identify and reduce the social and environmental impacts of such products as salmon, soy, sugarcane, cotton, shrimp, beef and palm oil. Dr. Clay leads WWF’s efforts to work with companies to improve supply chain management, particularly with regard to ingredient sourcing, GHG emissions, and water take and effluent, and with industries or entire sectors to transform their overall performance.

Dr. Clay is the author of 20 books, more than 500 articles and 1,000 invited presentations. His most recent books are World Aquaculture and the Environment, Exploring the Links between International Business and Poverty Reduction: A Case Study of Unilever in Indonesia, and World Agriculture and the Environment. In addition to his role at WWF, Dr. Clay is National Geographic's first ever Food and Sustainability Fellow. He also won a 2012 James Beard Award for his work on global food sustainability. Dr. Clay was awarded Tuft University’s Jean Mayer Global Humanitarian Award in 2013.

Dr. Clay studied at Harvard University and the London School of Economics before receiving a Ph.D. in anthropology and international agriculture from Cornell University.