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Eleni Gabre-Madhin is working to build Ethiopia's first commodities market. Re-establishing the profit motive for farmers, she believes, could help turn the world's largest recipient of food aid into a regional food basket.

Why you should listen to her:
Economist Eleni Gabre-Madhin has ambitious vision -- to found the first commodities market in Ethiopia, bringing rates and standards (not to mention trading systems, warehousing and data centers) to the trade of crops. Gabre-Madhin left her earlier job, as a World Bank senior economist in Washington, DC, in part because she was disturbed by the 2002 famine in Ethiopia -- after a bumper crop of maize the year before. With prices depressed, many farmers simply left their grain in the field in 2001. But when the rains failed in 2002, a famine of 1984 proportions threatened the country. Her dream: to build a market that protects the African farmer, who is too often living at the mercy of forces beyond his or her control.

The director of the International Food Policy Research Institute, Madhin studies market reforms, market institutions, and structural transformation in Africa, and works to create "a world free of hunger and malnutrition."

Watch Her Presentationat TED.com

• Building a Commodities Market in Ethiopia

Brief Profile:

Dr. Eleni Zaude Gabre-Madhin joined IFPRI in July 2004 to lead the new Ethiopia Country Strategy Support Program. Based in Addis Ababa, the program will collaborate closely with the Ethiopian Development Research Institute (EDRI) and other Ethiopian research institutions. Prior to joining IFPRI, Dr. Gabre-Madhin was a Senior Sector Economist in the Environment and Socially Sustainable Development (ESSD) Department, Africa Region, of the World Bank in Washington, DC. An Ethiopian national, Dr. Gabre-Madhin, has held positions as a research fellow in the Markets, Trade, and Institutions Division of IFPRI and as an economist and commodity trading expert at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in Geneva. She holds a Ph.D. in applied economics from Stanford University and received the Outstanding Dissertation Award from the American Agricultural Economics Association in 1999. Her research has focused on market reforms, market institutions, and structural transformation in Africa.

source: www.ted.com; http://www.ifpri.org/