KemetLeadsTewolde Berhan Gebre Egziabher
He held a coalition of poor countries together at the table — and changed a global treaty text.
The rise
Born in Adwa and trained as a botanist at Addis Ababa University and in Wales, Tewolde taught biology in Addis Ababa, led the Ethiopian Flora Project, served as president of Asmara University, and from 1995 ran Ethiopia's Environmental Protection Authority.
What they did
Through the 1990s he built a corps of prepared African negotiators and spoke for the Like-Minded Group of developing countries in the talks that produced the Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety in January 2000, winning the precautionary language that still governs trade in living modified organisms. He also guided the African model law on the rights of communities, farmers and breeders.
The full picture
His absolute opposition to GM crops and to plant-variety patents was contested by African agronomists who argue it slowed adoption of drought-tolerant varieties on a hungry continent. He also served long years inside an EPRDF government whose record on resettlement and large dams he rarely criticised in public.
Why it matters
He is the rare African who changed a treaty text — by coalition and by refusing to sign. That is a concrete demonstration of how African leverage in multilateral rooms actually works.
“We have made progress in asserting our local community rights globally. We shall continue to do so.”