Armando Samper Gnecco

Armando Samper Gnecco was a Colombian agronomist and public official who served twice as Colombia's Minister of Agriculture, from August 1966 to July 1967 and again from October 1969 to August 1970, and who was a founding member of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture, CIAT, established in his country in the late 1960s. Born in Bogota in 1920 and educated in agricultural economics at Cornell University, he led the Inter-American Institute for Agricultural Sciences as its general director from 1960 to 1966 and later served as the Food and Agriculture Organization's deputy general director for Latin America from 1972 to 1974. He went on to lead two more Colombian agricultural institutions, the forest research body CONIF from 1974 to 1978 and the Colombian Sugarcane Research Center, Cenicana, as president and general director from 1978 to 1990, before his death in Bogota in 2010.