Chuck Chopak to Co-Chair SID Workgroup on Food Security & Agriculture

May 22, 2015

DAI Vice President for Technical Services Chuck Chopak has been chosen to co-chair the Society for International Development (SID) Washington, D.C., Chapter’s workgroup on food security and agriculture.

“This is a great time to be working in our field,” he said, “and I’m delighted to have this opportunity to engage with my SID colleagues on the pressing issues of our day, from Feed the Future and pro-poor market systems development to challenges and opportunities around nutrition, trade, gender, youth, and ICT in agriculture.”

A past president of the Association for International Agriculture and Rural Development, Chopak has more than 30 years of experience in food security- and agriculture-related programming. Following service in the Peace Corps in Senegal, he joined the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) as an agriculture specialist before embarking on graduate work at Michigan State University, where he wrote his doctoral thesis on household food security in Zimbabwe.

This research set the stage for a career committed to alleviating poverty and hunger by tackling issues central to the agricultural economies of developing countries. His career encompasses work in 26 countries in Africa—as well as in Afghanistan, Central America, and Haiti—and more than a decade and a half of service on USAID’s flagship Famine Early Warning System (FEWS) project, and its successor, FEWSNET, which he led from 2005 to 2008.

In that year, Chopak joined DAI’s Agriculture and Food Security team, where among other assignments he was asked to lead external evaluations of various World Food Programme country portfolios. From 2013, he has served as the Technical Area Manager for DAI’s Agriculture Production and Food Security practice, providing technical and managerial leadership to the firm’s portfolio. Before becoming the Vice President of Technical Services, which provides technical expertise and leadership to DAI projects across all of the company’s technical sectors, he managed DAI’s Africa Region.