Work & Activities

Agronomist, botanist and ornithologist, he defended human rights and specialised in programmes to fight famine since 1998. His career has moved into two different fields: food security and biodiversity preservation. He has worked with the European Commission, the Spanish Red Cross and the FAO (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations) in different countries, both in Africa (Ethiopia and Kenia) and Latin America (Guatemala, Chile and Nicaragua). Today he is the regional coordinator of ‘Acción contra el Hambre’ in Central America. In 1998 and 2002 he was working with this same non-governmental organization in the Caucasus. He attended postgraduate courses in Management of Natural Spaces, Development Cooperation, Food Security, Forest Resources and Geopolitics in Spain, United Kingdom, Belgium and Holland. He wrote many articles about famine, food security and human rights both in national and international magazines and chapters of books. He has recently written “Derecho a la Alimentación y Políticas Públicas en América Latina” and has just opened a blog about famine in Latin America to announce this problem in Spain.
Together with a Professor of the University of Santiago, he has described new species of plants in Spain and Ethiopia; he is a member of the tree expert group of the IUCN and the campaign to save threatened trees (www.globaltrees.org). He wrote a book about endemic birds, another one about pictures of Ethiopia and two books about threatened books in Guatemala and Ethiopia. He has been reading a lot about Galician medieval history and has wide information about the genealogy of his ancestors that is placing in a blog (www.apellidovivero.blogspot.com). He has been a foundation member of the Chair of Studies on Famine and Poverty of the University of Cordoba (www.cehap.org ) and has promoted many postgraduate courses on famine and food in several countries of Latin America and Spain. He worked at universities of Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Paraguay, Ecuador, Chile, Santander, Castellón and Córdoba. He promoted and participated in “América Latina y Caribe sin Hambre” (www.rlc.fao.org/iniciativa), an initiative taken by Lula, president of Brazil, and Berger, president of Guatemala in 2005, that today groups all the countries of the region as a platform of political commitment and sensibilization of society to eradicate famine before 2025. At the beginning of 2010 he has presented a proposal to improve the governability of the fight against world famine by means of an international binding treaty and a public register of political commitments against famine to eradicate on the face of the earth before 2025.