background

Originally from Scotland but raised in Canada Haroon Akram-Lodhi worked in the food service industry until his mid-twenties and was an activist in the United Food and Commercial Workers Union before commencing his academic career, which led to him receiving his PhD in economics from the University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, Canada in 1992. His doctoral research was on the intersection of gender relations and agrarian class formation in the North-West Frontier Province, now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, of Pakistan. In addition to conducting field research in Pakistan, he has conducted fieldwork in China, Ethiopia, Fiji, Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, Tanzania and Vietnam. He has taught at the University of Manitoba, at London South Bank University, UK, at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam in The Hague, the Netherlands, and at Trent University in Peterborough, Canada.

Haroon Akram-Lodhi's major research interests are in feminist agrarian political economy, gender relations and the economy, and the political ecology of gendered sustainable rural livelihoods and food systems in the countries of the global South. As such, he has researched and written on the economics of gender relations in agrarian development, on the theory and practice of the economics of the household, on the political ecology of engendered agrarian relations, institutions and communities, on the empirical estimation of agrarian classes and their gender dimensions, on water governance and engendered social and community institutions, on the operation of socially-embedded ‘real’ markets in rural communities, on access to land, natural resources and the sustainability of gendered agrarian structures, and on gender, nature and the ‘agrarian question’. He has also conducted research and written on structural adjustment, the use of structural macromodels in policymaking, health economics, gender relations and macroeconomic dynamics, gender relations and the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and the gendered characteristics and impact of government revenue and spending. In addition to undergraduate and graduate degree, diploma and occasional teaching in these areas, he also taught extensively in the area of rural economics research methodology. Haroon Akram-Lodhi continues to act as an examiner for doctoral candidates.

Haroon Akram-Lodhi has provided policy advice to a number of organizations, including UN Women, the World Food Programme, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, the United Nations Capital Development Fund, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Environment Programme, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Canadian International Development Agency, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the European Commission. He has, in the course of this work, been responsible for the financial and programmatic management of several large projects. He has also conducted tailor-made training for, among others, the United Nations Development Programme, the United Nations Development Fund for Women, UN Women, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs and CARE. 

Haroon Akram-Lodhi’s current research includes: gender and agricultural productivity; gender and rainfall in agricultural production; the dynamics of the global subsistence crisis; the evolution of global land governance; the impact of globalization and the climate crisis on the sustainability of gendered peasant social institutions, relations and communities; the potential of agroecology to enhance the rural productive forces; and gender, economic theory and economic policy.

He has published research in a variety of peer-reviewed journals, including:

• Development & Change

• Journal of Agrarian Change    

•  Journal of International Development

• Journal of Peasant Studies

• Third World Quarterly

• Feminist Economics

• Dialectical Anthropology

• Journal of Post Keynesian Economics

• International Review of Applied Economics

• European Journal of Development Research

• Journal of Contemporary Asia

• Journal of the Asia Pacific Economy

• Development Policy Review

• Canadian Journal of Development Studies

• World Development

• Journal of Australian Political Economy

• Contemporary South Asia

• Canadian Food Studies

• Studies in Political Economy

• International Journal of Health Services

• Health Policy and Planning

He has co-edited:

• Handbook of Critical Agrarian Studies

• Peasants and Globalization: Political Economy, Rural Transformation and the Agrarian Question 

• Land, Poverty and Livelihoods in an Era of Globalization: Perspectives from Developing and Transition Economies

• Globalization, Neoconservative Failures and Democratic Alternatives: Essays in Honour of John Loxley

• Water, Pipes and People in Pakistan: The Social and Economic Impact of the Salinity Control and Reclamation Project in Mardan, Northern Pakistan   

and has edited

• Confronting Fiji Futures.

In 2013 he published:

• Hungry for Change: Farmers, Food Justice and the Agrarian Question

He is currently working on:

• "So Tired": Gender and Agricultural Productivity in Eastern and Southern Africa