Global Food Security and Sustainability Conference

Biography

Manuela Zoninsein has been passionate about food and sustainability since working on the commodities exchange at the Chicago Board of Trade at age 18.She established AgVali, the first marketplace platform connecting suppliers of best-in-class agricultural inputs with the largest network of qualified agricultural distributors in emerging markets, initiated in Brazil, in order to enable farmers to discover suitable new products and to dictate the market for agriculture products. Prior to AgVali, Manuela launched Smart Agriculture Analytics,a data subscription service that tracked the market opportunity for world-leading agricultural solutions in China. She created SAA’s first product in while studying at Tsinghua University on a Blakemore Fellowship. Manuela was both an environment correspondent and a food writer, reporting for the Engineering News-Record and ClimateWire as well as serving as dining editor for Time Out Beijing. She first moved to Beijing with a Princeton-in-Asia Fellowship in 2007, reporting for Newsweek, where she built the magazine's first blog, the Engineering News-Record, where she was the inaugural China correspondent, and serving as Asia bureau chief for Dell computers to launch takeyourownpath.cn, a platform selling technology to SMEs, in Mandarin. Manuela has degrees from Harvard and Oxford, and studied Mandarin at Tsinghua and National Taiwan University on a Blakemore Fellowship and Huayu Scholarship.

Research Interest

Agriculture