dr. R (Rico) Ihle
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Dr. Rico Ihle is an associate professor at the Agricultural Economics and Rural Policy Group of Wageningen University. He holds a PhD from Georg-August-Universität Göttingen (Germany).
Dr. Ihle is also Adjunct Professor at the Department of Agricultural Socio-Economics of the Universitas Padjadjaran located in Bandung, West Java, Indonesia’s second largest urban center and the seventh largest urban agglomeration of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). In 2024 he has been elected Secretary General of the International Network for the MBA Agribusiness and Commerce (AgriMBA). For AgriMBA he has taught courses at Technical University of Moldova, National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine as well as Kazan State Agricultural University (Russia).
His teaching focuses on economic and policy analysis for agricultural and food markets, on the sustainability transformation of the EU food systems as well as on quantitative research methods and research skills for market and policy analysis. At WUR he is teaching the BEB courses Econometrics (AEP21306), Economics of Agriculture, Food and Policy (AEP21806) as well as the MME course Economics of EU policies for sustainable food systems (AEP30306) and the PhD course Intro to R programming for Social Sciences at WASS. He has organized BEB study tours (YSS21303) to Slovakia, Morocco, Hungary and Munich. Currently, he is supervising 5 PhD students and several BSc and MSc students.
He has also taught at University of Bologna (Italy), Universitas Padjadjaran (Indonesia), Czech University of Life Sciences (Czechia), Göttingen University (Germany), Hohenheim University (Germany), University for Development Studies (Ghana) and Talca University (Chile).
His research interests are centered around SDG2 of "zero hunger" as well as sustainability and resilience of selected food system aspects. His Research@WUR contains details on his research outputs. They include the analysis of agricultural markets and food prices, economic aspects of violent political conflict, the effects of public policies on food markets and economic aspects of food system resilience and sustainability. He is especially interested in EU agricultural markets, food markets of Indonesia, the Middle East, and Northern Africa as well as food price analysis and monitoring. He also works occasionally on other food-related topics in Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions. He has a broad expertise in quantitative methods with a specialization on time series econometrics. He is publishing his research in major agricultural economics journals such as the European Review of Agricultural Economics, Food Policy or Agricultural Economics and has co-authored more than 100 conference contributions. Most of his working papers and conference contributions can be found here.
He is leader of Work Package 4 of e-AgriMBA. He was principal investigator of the research project "Genetically Modified Food in Dutch Grocery Shelves" (final report) commissioned by Commissie Genetische Modificatie (COGEM). In 2019, he established the EconMonday seminar, the internal staff and PhD research seminar of the Section Economics, and coordinated it until 2023. He currently serves as an associate editor of "Food Security - The Science, Sociology and Economics of Food Production and Access to Food".
Together with the Kyiv School of Economics, he has organized the webinar on "Implications of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for global food markets and food policies" and an organized session on the topic at the 2023 EAAE congress in cooperation with the Kyiv School of Economics, IAMO and OECD. He is the WUR contact person for the subject area Economics and Management of the Euroleague of Life Sciences (ELLS), member of the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium (IATRC), and has a wide international network in Europe, Indonesia, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.