Ginya Truitt Nakata
Director of Lands in the Latin America Region, The Nature Conservancy
Ginya Truitt Nakata is the Director of Lands, Latin America, for The Nature Conservancy (TNC), where she leads the development and implementation of regional strategies that address systemic barriers to sustainable agricultural production and their impact on habitats critical to long-term growth and the planet's health. Ginya has been a close ally to TNC over the years and is a former member of the Latin American Conservation Council Working Group for Sustainable Agriculture, a group she now leads on behalf of TNC.
Ginya has more than 25 years of international development experience in agriculture and food security. For 20 years she worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), within both the Office of Outreach and Partnerships and with the Technical Cooperation Coordination Unit.
At IDB she led the development of a comprehensive policy paper on the potential of Latin America’s agriculture sector in addressing the global food security challenge, harnessing expertise from IDB cross-sector teams, more than two dozen private sector stakeholders, NGOs, multilateral organizations, academia, and cooperatives. The process resulted in the 2014 report The Next Global Breadbasket: How Latin America Can Feed the World and led to the creation of AgroLAC 2025, a multi-donor funding platform to identify and support sustainable agricultural practices and market systems in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Having worked for agricultural productivity in organizations across the development spectrum—including ACDI/VOCA, FAO and the Inter-American Development Bank – Ginya has become a recognized expert for her unique experience in developing strategies that rally stakeholders to work for common cause on critical issues related to global food security. She also recently became a New Vision for Agriculture Ambassador with the World Economic Forum, an honor extended to 20 senior representatives from around the world in order to exchange learnings and experiences as drivers and facilitators of multi-stakeholder approaches in agriculture.
Ginya holds an M.A. in International Development from The American University’s School of International Service and a B.A. in International Management/Spanish from Gustavus Adolphus College. She is fluent in English and Spanish, proficient in Italian, and has working knowledge of Portuguese.