Kees Blokland has been the founder and managing director of Agriterra since 1997. He worked in the 1980s through the FAO and the Dutch government in Nicaragua. He founded Via Campesina and Banco del Campo. He promoted AgriCord, Agri-ProFocus (Netherlands Food Partnership) and ACODEA (Spain). He was member of the Task Force Rural Africa convened by the commissioners of Agriculture of the EU and AU. He is a graduate from the Free University of Amsterdam in Economic Sciences and Cultural Anthropology. He holds a Ph.D in Social Sciences from the Leiden University Netherlands.