ProfessorWilliam Pritchard

Over the course of his career, Bill's research interests in agriculture, food and rural places have been channeled through a series of research foci and activities.

Regional change in Australia. Bill has been involved in numerous large research projects investigating changes to the human environments of rural Australia. These include: "High-value horticulture and global production networks in coastal Australia" (Australian Research Council [ARC] 2023-26); "What are the impacts of land ownership change for social and economic transformations in rural Australia?" (ARC and NSW Dept of Primary Industries, 2019-22); “Rural adjustment or structural transformation? Discovering the destinations of exiting farm families” (ARC and Government of Victoria, 2009-14), and "“Australia’s Rural Heartlands: Declining Economic Fortune or Dynamic Regional Adjustment?” (ARC, 2007-09). He is co-author (with Andrew Beer, Alaric Maude) of Developing Australia's Regions: Theory and Practice (UNSW Press, 2003) and was lead investigator in the four-year project The Aggregation and Fragmentation of Rural Land in Australia (https://rirdc.infoservices.com.au/items/12-038). Over the years he has given numerous presentations to Regional Development Organisations and other bodies.

Global food and nutrition security. Bill is a frequent commentator in the media and an invited speaker to public forums on this topic. He is lead editorof the Routledge 'Handbook on Food Security', published in 2016. His approach to researching global food security is laid out in his 2013 TEDx Sydney talk at the Sydney Opera House on global food security (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJc0tYNGcWo).

Food and nutrition security in Myanmar. From 2015-18, Bill led a large ARC-funded research project in rural Myanmar that generated new data and insights into the ways that livelihoods and nutrition indicators intersected at this important moment in Myanmar's history. The project involved interviewing 3,200 households in 120 villages. (See final research reports here, along with a large number of publications in peer-reviewed journals.) 

Food and nutrition security in India. Bill has been Chief Investigator for three major research projects in India since 2010. From 2010-14, Bill was Chief Investigator of a major international research project undertaking household-scale analyses of food security and livelihoods in rural India. With his collaborators on this project (Prof Anu Rammohan, UWA & Prof Madhushree Sekher, Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai), the team surveyed several hundred households and studied the local institutional settings in which these households are situated. Findings from this project have been published in the book Feeding India (2013, Routledge) http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415529679/ as well as in a number of journal articles, and Indian newspapers. From 2014-17 he was Chief Investigator of the 'Farmers of the Future: Challenges emerging from a Feminised Agriculture in India' project (led by ANU) which generated a series of research outputs flowing from statistical analysis and fieldwork in Gujarat and West Bengal. From 2024-26 he was the lead international researcher in the “Rapidly Changing Food Environments and Impact on Food Sustainability” project, funded by the Scheme for the Promotion of Academic and Research Collaboration (SPARC), with Prof Madhushree Sekher, Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

Global value chains. Bill has a long-standing research interest in the geographical implications of different ways in which agri-food products are connected to consumers (from paddock to plate) through global value chains. In Australia, his work in this area has involved studies of the wine, beef and dairy sectors. Internationally, it has covered the tea and coffee sectors, and this latter work (conducted with Jeff Neilson) led to the publication of Value Chain Struggles: Institutions and Governance in the Plantation Districts of South India (Blackwell, 2009) (http://au.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1405173939.html). He was also a global reviewer of UNCTAD's 2009 World Investment Report (Transnational Corporations, Agricultural Production and Development).