Ryan Bedford joined the Office of Agricultural Affairs in Manila in July 2018 as an Agricultural Attache for the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). Prior to this assignment, Ryan was a Special Assistant at the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service’s (FAS) Office of Foreign Service Operations, where he was involved with the recruitment, training, and administration of personnel. Previously he was a livestock analyst for the FAS Office of Global Analysis, Global Commodity Analysis Division, where he forecast beef and cattle trade for the United States and foreign markets. He also managed FAS export promotion activities for U.S. forest products and pulses. Prior to this, he worked for over three years in the FAS Borlaug and Cochran Program’s Eastern Europe and Eurasia region, specializing in improving food security and food safety systems in the Balkans and Central Asia. He started in USDA as an intern at the National Institute for Food and Agriculture’s Policy and Oversight Division. Before joining USDA, he spent three years in Kumamoto, Japan teaching English in elementary and junior high school through the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program. Ryan earned a B.A. in International Relations from Florida International University and a Master of Public Policy from the University of Maryland, College Park. Ryan was born in Spain and raised in Detroit, Michigan, and Ogden, Utah.

Ramon Clarete is the Chief of the Party of the B-SAFE Project, which he is going to introduce in this presentation. He works for Winrock International. Before this, he was a Professor and a former Dean of the UP School of Economics. His teaching and research work is on trade and industrial policies, agriculture and food, and public sector policies. The NEDA hired him to do a cost-benefit analysis of tax incentives in the Philippines. He was an ADB consultant on the rice tariffication law. He was the Project Director of the US Department of State/ENR gas policy development program for the Department of Energy. He had managed USAID trade capacity-building technical assistance projects in the Philippines including the Policy Team of the Agribusiness System Assistance Program (ASAP), Accelerating Growth Investments and Liberalisation with Equity (AGILE); EMERGE and the LINC-EG projects. He was a Senior Trade Advisor of the USAID TRADE project for the DTI. He graduated from the University of Hawaii with a doctoral degree in economics.