Dr. Norman Uphoff

Norman Uphoff, professor emeritus of government and international agriculture at Cornell University, served as a director of the Cornell International Institute for Food, Agriculture, and Development (CIIFAD) from 1990 to 2005, during which time he learned about and began working with the System of Rice Intensification. He joined the Cornell faculty in 1970 after earning graduate degrees from Princeton and the University of California at Berkeley, and he chaired the Rural Development Committee at Cornell. Until 1990, he worked mostly on aspects of participatory development: local organizations, farmer associations, irrigation management, and other collective action means for assisting smallholding farmers in the developing world. In the 1980s, he served on USAID’s Research Advisory Committee and the U.S. Social Science Research Council's South Asia Committee. After becoming the director of CIIFAD in 1990, his work focused more on sustainable agriculture and rural development, particularly agroecology.