Jason Clay

Jason Clay leads the work of WWF-US on agriculture, aquaculture, business and industry, finance, fisheries, and forests. Over the course of his career he has worked on a family farm and in the U.S. Department of Agriculture. He has taught at Harvard and Yale and spent more than 25 years with human rights and environmental organizations.

In 1988, Dr. Clay invented Rainforest Marketing, one of the first fair-trade ecolabels in the United States, and was responsible for co-creating Rainforest Crunch and more than 200 other products with combined sales of $100 million. From 1999-2003, he co-directed a consortium with WWF, World Bank, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, and National Aquaculture Centres of Asia/Pacific to identify the most significant environmental and social impacts of shrimp aquaculture and analyze better management practices that measurably reduce them.

Since then he has co-convened (with the IFC and others) multi-stakeholder roundtables of producers, investors, buyers, researchers and NGOs to identify and reduce the social and environmental impacts of such products as salmon, soy, sugarcane, cotton, and palm oil. Dr. Clay leads WWF’s efforts to work with private sector companies to improve their supply chain management, particularly with regard to ingredient sourcing and carbon and water neutrality, and with industries to transform entire sectors by improving their overall performance.

Dr. Clay is the author of 15 books, more than 300 articles and 700 invited presentations. His most recent books are World Aquaculture and the Environment, Exploring the Links between International Business and Poverty Reduction: A Case Study of Unilever in Indonesia, and World Agriculture and the Environment. In addition to his role at WWF, Dr. Clay is National Geographic's first ever Food and Sustainability Fellow. He also won a 2012 James Beard Award for his work on global food sustainability.