Speaker

Richard L. Lackey is an entrepreneur, regenerative economist, and advisor to sovereigns working at the intersection of food systems, capital markets, and predictive analytics. For more than thirty years, he has built trading platforms that bring new liquidity to developing markets, predictive analytics companies, and market-based institutions designed to make smallholder agriculture bankable, stabilize staple-food markets, and restore the productive base of rural economies. He is Founder and Chief Executive Officer of World Food Bank Group, Inc., a food-security institution serving more than a dozen countries in Africa and Latin America. His unique model treats staple food as a long-term asset: farmer training and guaranteed offtake, storage technology that extends the shelf life of common commodities, and market coordination to dampen price volatility. He earlier founded the Global Food Exchange, establishing food as a tradable asset class for disaster response and commodity sourcing, and structuring an ecosystem in which farmers, lenders, manufacturers, governments, and investors each have a defined role. As Chairman of Mediae Group, he leads agricultural-education TV media expanded across East Africa and into the United States. Lackey has served as a presidential appointee to the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development (BIFAD). His professional advisory network includes global companies and government work;his work is unique, working alongside leaders to leapfrog traditional development programs through integrated digital, technical, energy, education, and social infrastructure. He previously built institutional trading businesses and proprietary software later acquired by firms including Goldman Sachs and eTrade, and applied the same macro-to-micro discipline to hospitality assets in Central America through Greatwater Investment Management. Lackey is the author of Wall Street’s Ten Greatest Myths (McGraw-Hill, 2004) and Radical Response: Free Market Solutions to Global Crises (2014), an Amazon bestseller in philanthropy, and of Technical Analysis for Traders (1998). Books in preparation include Introduction to Regenerative Finance and The Zero Hunger Formula. A three-time TEDx speaker—including at TEDx Boston MIT—he addresses redemptive economics, soil health and food security, and market-driven routes out of poverty.