Student Organizations

Interested students are invited to attend this exciting class visit of Florence Chenoweth.

Florence Chenoweth (Agricultural Economics Master's, 1970, Land Resources Ph.D., 1980) was awarded an honorary degree and distinguished alumni award last May at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After earning her Master's degree at Madison, Chenoweth returned to her native Liberia to become its first female minister of agriculture at the age of 32. A decade later she fled the country with her children, walking across it to Sierra Leone, in the wake of a violent coup. The ensuing unrest plunged Liberia into civil war and anarchy and claimed the lives of many prominent citizens there. Chenoweth and her children barely escaped. After returning to UW-Madison to complete her doctorate in 1986, she worked on a UW-Madison agricultural policy project in Zambia. Her work there brought liberalization of Zambia's food markets. In 1995, Chenoweth joined the FAO as its representative in Gambia, where she led efforts to revitalize assistance programs and conduct a review of the agricultural and natural resources that has helped guide Gambia's development.At the end of apartheid, she opened the FAO's first office in South Africa, which coordinated flood relief efforts for 2.5 million displaced people in 2000. Her subsequent work led to her appointment as FAO representative to the U.N. and executive director of the FAO Liaison Office in New York. In that capacity she continues to carry the Wisconsin Idea around the world.