Jason Clay is senior vice president for markets and executive director of the Markets Institute at WWF. In these roles he works with companies on more sustainable supply chains as well as helping them identify and address emerging global issues, trends, and tools impacting their supply chains in more sustainable, timely, cost-effective, and scalable ways. His career has ranged from working on a family farm to working for the US Department of Agriculture. He taught at Harvard and Yale and spent more than 35 years with human rights and environmental NGOs. In 1988, Clay founded Rainforest Marketing, set up a trading company within an NGO, helped forest based groups access global markets, and launched Ben & Jerry’s Rainforest Crunch, plus more than 200 other products with sales of $100 million. From 1999 to 2003, he co-directed a consortium with WWF, the World Bank, UN FAO, and NACA to identify the most significant environmental and social impacts of shrimp aquaculture as well as practices to reduce them. From 2004 to 2012, he convened multistakeholder roundtables to create performance-based standards for commodities including salmon, soy, sugarcane, cotton, and beef. He was pivotal in launching WWF’s work on agriculture, aquaculture, livestock, and Market Transformation in 2006. Clay leads WWF-US efforts to improve private sector supply chain management and has helped entire sectors improve their sustainability performance (e.g., the Global Salmon Initiative). Clay has authored 18 books and 400 articles and has given more than 1,000 invited presentations. He studied anthropology and agriculture at Harvard, the London School of Economics, and Cornell (PhD).

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