Hope Shand, Research Director

Hope Shand is ETC group's Research Director. She has written extensively on the topic of agricultural biodiversity, and on the social and economic impacts of new biotechnologies. Hope is the author of Human Nature: Agricultural Biodiversity and Farm-Based Food Security (1998).

She is co-author of The Ownership of Life: When Patents and Values Clash (1997). In 1993 Hope authored Harvesting Nature's Diversity, the official document on agricultural biodiversity published by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Hope holds a master's degree in Regional Planning (population and development) from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a B.A. from Duke University in Comparative Area Studies. She is the mother of a teenager, and her family lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.