Miguel Altieri studied agronomy at the
University of Chile, where he received a bachelor's degree. He graduated with a Ph.D. in
entomology at the
University of Florida. In 1981 he became Professor of
agroecology at the
University of California, Berkeley in the Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management. He has been teaching courses in agroecology,
agroforestry and
urban agriculture. He is an advocate of
sustainable agriculture and is highly critical of large
agribusiness corporations such as Cargill, Monsanto, and ADM. He has conducted most of his research in California and Chile working closely with farmers and workers to implement principles of
integrated pest management,
intercropping,
cover cropping, crop-field border vegetation manipulation, and other sustainable practices of
biological control. Altieri served as a Scientific Advisor to the Latin American Consortium on Agroecology and Development (CLADES) Chile, an NGO network promoting agroecology as a strategy for small farm sustainable development in the region. He also served for 4 years as the General Coordinator for the
United Nations Development Programme’s Sustainable Agriculture Networking and Extension Programme which aimed at capacity building on agroecology among NGOs and the scaling-up of successful local sustainable agricultural initiatives in Africa, Latin America and Asia. He was the chairman of the NGO committee of the Consultative Group on International Agriculture Research whose mission was to make sure that the research agenda of the 15 International Agricultural Research Centers benefited poor farmers. He was Director of the US-Brasil Consortium on Agroecology and Sustainable Rural Development (CASRD), an academic-research exchange program involving students and faculty of UC Berkeley, University of Nebraska, UNICAMP and Universidad Federal de Santa Catarina. As of 2011 he has been advisor to the
Food and Agriculture Organization Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) program, which is devoted at identifying and dynamically conserving traditional farming systems in the developing world. He is the President of the Latin American Scientific Society of Agroecology. In 2012, he supported farming the
Gill Tract, a UC owned part of land. in 2017, he became Honorary Professor of the
University of La Frontera == Publications ==