Pat Roy MOONEY Right Livelihood Award Laureate; Executive Director, ETC Group, Ottawa
CV
| Pat Mooney, a Canadian, is the co-founder and executive director of ETC group -- an international civil society organization headquartered in Canada with offices in Ethiopia, Mexico, Philippines and USA. ETC group has consultative status with ECOSOC, FAO, UNCTAD, UNEP, UNFCCC, IPCC and the UN Biodiversity Convention. Since 1977, ETC group has focused on the role of new technologies on the lives and livelihoods of marginalized peoples around the world. Pat Mooney has almost half a century of experience working in international civil society, first addressing aid and development issues and then focusing on food, agriculture and commodity trade. He received The Right Livelihood Award (the "Alternative Nobel Prize") in the Swedish Parliament in 1985 and the Pearson Peace Prize from Canada's Governor General in 1998. He has also received the American "Giraffe Award" given to people "who stick their necks out." | |
| The author or co-author of several books on the politics of biotechnology and biodiversity, Pat Mooney is widely regarded as an authority on issues of global governance, corporate concentration, and intellectual property monopoly. Although much of ETC's work continues to emphasize plant genetic resources and agricultural biodiversity, the work expanded in the early 1980s to include biotechnology. In the late 1990s, the work expanded further to encompass a succession of emerging technologies such as nanotechnology, synthetic biology, geoengineering, and new developments in genomics and neurosciences. | |
| Currently, the organization is closely involved in preparations for this year's Rio+20 Conference. Mooney and ETC group contribute their experience in helping to reform the UN/FAO Committee on World Food Security which is now a model of intergovernmental and multi-agency collaboration on food issues and includes a novel and highly successful interactive relationship between governments, civil society and UN secretariats. ETC group is proposing the UN CFS model for any new institutional initiatives that may arise from the Rio +20 process. Based upon Mr. Mooney s and ETC s experience, the organization is also advancing proposals for the development of a UN Office for Technology Assessment or another technology assessment facility within the UN system that might ultimately evolve into an International Convention for the Evaluation of New Technologies (ICENT). |
