Hope C. Michelson

About Hope C. Michelson

Hope C. Michelson is a nonresident fellow on global food and agriculture at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. She's currently an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Consumer Economics at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Michelson earned her PhD in Applied Economics at Cornell and completed a post-doctoral fellowship with the Agriculture and Food Security Center at Columbia University. Her research is at the intersection of development and agriculture. She focuses on small farmers in low income countries and on the relationships between agriculture, natural resources, markets, and household outcomes. She has a special interest in household poverty dynamics and food security at multiple spatial scales.

One current focus of her work is the evolving impacts of new large-scale market systems including global value chains on small-scale farmers. She has studied supermarket supply chains for fresh fruits and vegetables in China and Nicaragua and their implications for farmer participation and welfare. Other related key interests include interconnections among soil fertility, the use of agricultural inputs, and local and regional food security. Ongoing projects include food security crisis prediction, analysis of farmer beliefs about fertilizer quality, and the effects of downside output price risk on farmer contracting and investment.