DAWSON WILLIAMS

Consultant, Cantera Partners

Mr. Williams has spent more than 20 years in international agriculture as a commodity broker, analyst, and market economist. He has extensive experience in leading commodity sales, managing freight and logistics, conducting program evaluations and market studies for agricultural cooperators, and directing monetization efforts for USDA’s Food for Progress. As a broker of U.S. agricultural products, Mr. Williams had several customers in Sub-Saharan Africa. In 2018, he participated in two of the first post-monetization assessments that were initially mandated with the 2017 Food for Progress awards. This included the 2017 Honduras project. His work on that assessment consisted of two in-country visits, developing profiles of the key industry participants and buyers, conducting interviews with the participants and trade associations, gathering pricing information and shipment details from port officials in Honduras, as well as third party data resources, working to analyze the price data with the team’s econometrician, and producing several sections of the report. He also developed the market profiles for the 2017 Mozambique and Malawi projects as part of that impact study.

While at USDA, he oversaw the monetization of more than 1 million metric tons of bulk commodities, generating more than $430 million in project proceeds, and reviewed all of the post-monetization assessments covering the Food for Progress projects from 2017 through 2020. He also led efforts to improve the internal Market Analysis for Monetization (MAM) process and updated the guidance for the post-monetization assessment and revised the monetization handbook. Prior to USDA, Mr. Williams also undertook a number of market studies, program evaluations, and benchmark assessments for U.S. and foreign agricultural cooperators. In 2019, he completed an in-depth study of Togo and its potential to serve as point-of-entry and trade hub for U.S. soybean products on behalf of the American Soybean Association (ASA). That work involved a detailed study of Togo’s domestic soybean production and its poultry and aquaculture sectors. Mr. Williams has a master’s degree in international relations with a focus on energy and natural resource economics from the Johns Hopkins School for Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington, DC, and an MBA with a concentration in finance from the HEC School of Management in Paris. He is fluent in Spanish.