Globaldev careers: The food security expert

As a highschooler, Richard Choularton volunteered for a disaster relief NGO in his hometown, loading medical supplies onto pallets in aircraft to be flown to the site of earthquakes and other rapid-onset disasters. When Choularton graduated from college, he decided to pursue a career in emergency relief. After discovering that most of the available positions were with the United Nations, and required both a master’s degree and fluency in multiple official U.N. languages, he enrolled in a master’s program in risk, crisis, and disaster management and moved to Cuba to learn Spanish. “I’ve done everything from running emergency food assistance programs on the ground to running early warning systems for food crises to leading [the World Food Programme’s] climate and disaster risk reduction program,” said Choularton, who is now director of agriculture and food security sector at Tetra Tech. Choularton spoke with Devex about the host of roles he has held with different organizations working on food security and what advice he has for others looking to pursue a career in the sector. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. What is the job of a food security expert? The most important thing for anybody working in food security is to try and understand how people are accessing food, how they’re using it, how they grow it, what kinds of different foods they eat, how the agricultural and food system around them shapes what they eat and how they eat, what disrupts that — things like market shocks or natural disasters. “A major challenge for food security people now is starting to integrate a better understanding of climate change and climate science.” --— Richard Choularton, director of agriculture and food security sector, Tetra Tech Then identify ways to help people in different circumstances to improve their food security ... in terms of access, availability, utilization, and stability. It’s really about looking at all of those things for different population groups and communities and trying to figure out how to help them improve it, how to help them address any challenges that they’re having. What does your day to day look like? My day-to-day job is split in two or three different areas. First is management. I run our agriculture, food security, and economic growth programs at Tetra Tech globally, so there’s a lot of management stuff there. I spend a lot of time on program design and developing proposals for USAID and other clients. Before COVID I would say, go to a place like Honduras … and spend three weeks out in the field talking to farmers and cooperatives and ministry of agriculture officials and health center staff, trying to really understand what was happening and what challenges local populations were facing. I spend then a fairly significant amount of time doing project implementation and technical work mostly for projects. How did you end up in your role? I think a lot of us get first breaks in crises when organizations need staffing, and so at my first job [for WFP] I was responsible for feeding 125,000 people affected by Hurricane Mitch in Nicaragua and running an office with 40 staff and $6 million worth of food and trucks and warehouses. That was a good learning experience. Then because I worked for WFP, I started learning about food security and that’s just where I’ve stayed. I ended up learning more and more about this intersection of food security and disasters … At that time the whole humanitarian system realized that they needed major upgrades in investments in emergency preparedness and contingency planning and early warning because that was the time where you had Hurricane Mitch and Kosovo and East Timor and the Mozambique floods. The system was stretched and overwhelmed and so I was really lucky at that time to have my academic background in an area that nobody really had. I got pulled from the field to WFP headquarters in Rome to set up all the emergency preparedness and contingency planning and emergency operational support systems that WFP has now. What are some challenges faced in the profession? One of the things I was asked to do when I joined Tetra Tech … was really trying to link all the work we were doing around climate change and the environment with all the work we were doing around climate-smart agriculture and really strengthen those. A major challenge for food security people now is starting to integrate a better understanding of climate change and climate science and move beyond “it’s going to be hotter and drier and we’re going to have more climate extremes” to really understanding what that means for supporting households to become more resilient, have systems and institutions and environments around them that can support their food security rather than just focusing on access at the household level. “Focus on opportunities to understand the dynamics of food security at household and community level as much as you can.” --— How do you see the impact of your work? When I ran emergency operations it was really direct and visible. You get to meet the people you are helping, you get to talk to them, you … listen to what they need, and then you try and help them get whatever it is. Doing institutional capacity building or policy work is less visible, but in some ways maybe more important. There are certain things I’m pretty proud of. I spent seven years supporting the negotiation of the Paris climate change agreement and the Sendai disaster risk reduction framework and there are sections of the Paris Agreement that … come directly from my work supporting the countries negotiating. It’s pretty satisfying to see finally all 187 or 190 countries that are party to the [U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change] agree that food security is critical and that making sure that the impact of climate extremes on food security is a critical part of adaptation plans. What advice do you have for other professionals looking to work in food security? Focus on opportunities to understand the dynamics of food security at household and community level as much as you can, and never forget that when you're working on something that isn’t as direct. Really try to use that core understanding of household-level food security to inform the questions you ask people, whether those people are government officials or people in communities. And to use that to inform the design of programs and activities and evaluations. Keeping a focus on trying to understand first what’s happening at household and community level across all the aspects of food security is a great way to develop knowledge and expertise.