Erik Orsenna

Erik Orsenna is an economist, a writer and an expert on durable growth, environment, agriculture and emerging economies. He is a member of the prestigious Académie Française. He brings his advices and experience to several important French companies on their adjustment to the new global economic and natural resources situation.

He worked with the late French President François Mitterrand as special counselor.

Erik Orsenna has written more than thirty books, novels and essays, among which are several best sellers like L'Exposition Coloniale, Madame Bâ, Portrait du Gulf Stream, L'Entreprise des Indes, Voyage au pays du Coton or L'Avenir de l'Eau...

Erik has been engaged for more than fifteen years in travelling around the world, especially in Africa, Latin America and Asia, gathering materials for the writing of his essays about the hidden logics of globalization and the management of some natural resources like cotton.

He also works intensively on the subject of water management and resources around the world and has been chairing a special French think tank about water, named Le Forum des Idées Neuves sur l'Eau (New Ideas on Water Forum).

He sits on a special committee founded by the French ministry of agriculture on the future of European agriculture. Erik Orsenna belongs to La Fabrique de l'industrie, a think tank founded by Louis Gallois, CEO of EADS, in october 2011. The group was created to promote French industry.

Erik appears on numerous TV shows and participates to a significant number of debates and conferences in France where he brings a perfect sense of synthesis, an inspired vision of the future challenges of our planet related to natural resources, agriculture and emerging economies.

Erik can address a significant number of topics, especially the balance between growth and a durable use of natural resources, the necessity of a new approach in water management, even in developed countries, the future of agriculture and the necessity for new agricultural models in the developed world but also in the emerging world, the new balance of the world between Europe, United States and the new economic and politic powerhouses like China and India.