Morgan Carrington "Cary" Fowler Jr. (born 1949) is an American agriculturalist and the former executive director of the Crop Trust, currently serving as a senior advisor to the trust. On May 5th, Dr. Fowler joined the U.S. Department of State as U.S. Special Envoy for Global Food Security. Background Fowler was born in 1949 to Morgan, a General Sessions judge, and Betty, a dietician. He graduated from White Station High School in Memphis, Tennessee, in 1967, and attended Rhodes College in Memphis, but transferred in his junior year to Simon Fraser University in Canada, earning his B.A. Honors degree in 1971. He received a Ph.D. degree in Sociology from Uppsala University in Sweden. Fowler was active in civil rights demonstrations in Memphis. He was present at the Mason Temple on April 3, 1968, when Martin Luther King Jr. made his last speech, "I've Been to the Mountaintop". During the Vietnam War, he obtained conscientious objector status and worked at a hospital in North Carolina. Career In the 1970s-80s Fowler was Program Director for the National Sharecroppers Fund/Rural Advancement Fund. Following this, he served as Professor and Director of Research in the Department for International Environment & Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences in Ås, Norway. He also led the International Conference and Programme on Plant Genetic Resources at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (UN) in the 1990s. There, he produced the UN's first global assessment of the state of the world's crop diversity and was the chief author of the Food and Agriculture Organization's Global Plan of Action for Plant Genetic Resources. He subsequently supervised the negotiations that led to its adoption by 150 countries in 1996. From 1996 to 2001, Fowler represented the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) in negotiations for the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources. In 2010, he played a lead role in saving one of the world's largest living collections of fruit and berry varieties at the Pavlovsk Experiment Station in Russia. In order to save the Station, he led an international campaign of scientists and citizens who voiced their concerns about the threatened conversion of this station to a housing development. In 2013, Fowler was elected to Membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences, which carries the title of Academician. He is one of two foreign members of the Academy. Fowler has also previously served