Alex Wijeratna is a Senior Director at Mighty Earth, where he directs our global protein campaign. Through advocacy, campaigns, research, communications, he directs our campaign efforts to end deforestation and rights abuses throughout the meat industry. He’s also involved in our efforts to end deforestation more widely.
Prior to joining Mighty Earth, Alex worked with global human rights-based development agency ActionAid on a broad range of right to food, rural poverty and environmental issues including land grabbing, global hunger, international trade, climate justice, agro-ecology and business and human rights. He lobbied and campaigned on ActionAid’s successful international ‘Hunger Free’, ‘Stop Corporate Abuse’ and WTO-focused ‘Trade Justice’ Campaigns and served as a policy analyst on their global Hunger Task Force during the 2008 global food crisis.
Alex also has significant experience writing rights-based investigative reports for a host of global civil society organizations. He conducted an investigative report on land grabbing in Brazil, Liberia, Indonesia, and Mozambique for Friends of the Earth, and investigated corporate land grabs in Malawi for the Fairtrade Foundation. He exposed an iconic case of ‘Biopiracy’ involving the theft of the traditional knowledge of the Indigenous San people of the Kalahari and wrote a global review of right to food polices in 22 developing countries for the International Food Security Network. He has overseen human rights-based investigations of gold mining in Ghana, bauxite mining in India and platinum mining in South Africa for ActionAid and has written widely on issues ranging from land grabbing, nutrition, agro-ecology and UN food governance. With experience as a writer for The Times of London, Alex has conducted investigative research on rubber in South-east Asia for Global Witness and has written policy reports for numerous other campaign groups, including Action Against Hunger, Caritas and the UK Hunger Alliance – whose members include Oxfam, Care, and Save the Children.
Alex earned a BA in History from Sheffield University and has a post-graduate diploma in Periodical Journalism from City University London. He’s written articles for The Times, The Guardian, The Independent, The Face and the Daily Mail, and he has appeared on numerous global media outlets, including BBC, CNN, Sky News, Reuters, and Bloomberg TV.
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