Kathleen McAfee

Kathleen McAfee is Professor of International Relations at San Francisco State University. She received a doctorate in Geography at the University of California, Berkeley after a career in international development, including 10 years as Policy Analyst for Oxfam. She has authored a book, Storm Signals: Structural Adjustment and Development Alternatives, and many magazine and journal articles about environment, hunger, agriculture, biotechnology trade, debt and social justice. She has been a consultant to United Nations agencies and maintains ties with research centers, and NGOs and activist social movements in different world regions.

Before coming to SF State, Kathleen taught at Yale and then held the Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Sustainability. Her current research focuses on “selling nature to save it”: payment for ecosystem services, carbon-offset markets and alternative approaches that link climate change, conservation and development. Another research thread explores the connections among global food systems, crop genetic engineering, agroecology, food security and sovereignty and climate change. Her main field-research regions outside the United States are in Latin America, especially Mexico and the Caribbean. She teaches International Political Economy (undergraduate and postgraduate), Globalization and Development (undergraduate and postgraduate), Global Food and Hunger and Global Environmental Policy.