Peiman Milani is an international development professional and ag-nutrition expert with 20 years of leadership and technical experience. He has led multidisciplinary projects in East and West Africa, South and Southeast Asia, and the Americas. He currently advises The Rockefeller Foundation on its new Food Initiative. Previously, he led a cross-sector, multi-stakeholder food system transformation initiative in Rwanda encompassing processed and unprocessed foods, demand generation, and food system governance. Prior to that, he was the director of Nutrition Innovation at PATH, where he led a 20-strong global team dedicated to addressing malnutrition across an array of disciplines including technology development and transfer, nutrition clinical and implementation research, commercialization, safety net distribution, and communications and advocacy. Through his leadership, fortified rice became PATH’s first consumer product to break the 3-million consumer mark, was introduced in Myanmar, and gained scale-up momentum in India. His work has resulted in publications in the Stanford Social Innovation Review, the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, Frontiers in Microbiology, the Journal of Food Products Marketing, Maternal & Child Nutrition, and the Food and Nutrition Bulletin.
Authored Content
Sep 16 2020 Perspective The Two Fast Tracks of Covid-19 If you’ve ever played the classic children’s game Chutes and Ladders—or Snakes and Ladders in other parts of the world—you know that whether you land on a chute or a ladder can fast-track you to a quick win or loss. Like Chutes and Ladders, our diets give us two pathways: to climb up the ladder […]
Sep 16 2020 Perspective Can Policy Change Diet for Better Health? Yes, It Can – Now. For many years, British politician Boris Johnson decried the “nanny state”. In a 2004 article titled Face it: it’s all your own fat fault, he argued that obesity was a choice and state intervention would worsen things.[i] Fast forward to July 2020: now-Prime Minister Johnson launches a wide-ranging anti-obesity program in the UK.[ii] What changed […]
Jul 31 2020 Perspective Inspiring Glimpses of Tomorrow's African Food Systems Visionaries from across Africa—including Kenya, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Tanzania—responded to an invitation to imagine a more nourishing and resilient food future for 2050. The Rockefeller Foundation launched the Food System Vision Prize to enable people and communities to be protagonists in their own food futures. Of the 1300 visions submitted, 76 […]
Apr 03 2020 Perspective Five Covid-19 Reflections from a Food System Perspective—and How We Could Take Action As confirmed cases of Covid-19 increased throughout the world, the immediate instinct of many people was to ensure that they had enough food. The images of empty grocery store shelves and closed restaurants are stark and important reminders of how much we depend on our food system and how central food is in our lives. […]