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).

His teaching focuses on agricultural economics and policy analysis for agricultural and food market as well as quantitative research methods and research skills for market and policy analysis. Among others, he has taught at Göttingen University, Hohenheim University (Germany), the University for Development Studies (Ghana) and Talca University (Chile). At WUR he is teaching the BSc courses Econometrics (AEP21306), Agriculture, Food and Policy (AEP21806) as well as the MSc course Economics of EU policies for sustainability transitions (AEP30306) and the PhD course Intro to R programming for Social Sciences at WASS. He has organized BEB study tours to Slovakia, Morocco, Hungary and Munich (YSS21303). Currently, he is supervising the theses of 6 PhD students and of several BSc and MSc students.

His research interests are centered around SDG2 of "Zero hunger". 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. He is especially interested in EU agricultural markets, food markets of the Middle East, Northern Africa and Indonesia 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.

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". He is member of the International Agricultural Trade Research Consortium (IATRC) and associate member of the Courant Research Centre “Poverty, Equity and Growth” of Göttingen University. He has a wide international network in Europe, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.

He is member of the general board of the International Network for the MBA Agribusiness and Commerce (AgriMBA) for which he has taught courses at Kazan State Agricultural University and the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine and is leader of Work Package 4 of e-AgriMBA and principal investigator of the COGEM research project "Genetically Modified Food in Dutch Grocery Shelves". He is the WUR contact person for the subject area Economics and Management of the Euroleague of Life Sciences (ELLS). 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.

For more information, take a look at the Research@WUR profile of Dr. Ihle.

Dr. Ihle has been lead analyst of the report for the European Parliament on "The EU Cattle Sector: Challenges and Opportunities - Milk and Meat" as well as of the analysis conducted for the Joint Research of the EU on "Monitoring of Prices and Margins in EU Food Supply Chains: Existing and Alternative Approaches". He was lead econometric analyst for the Agro-Nutri Monitor 2020: Monitor prijsvorming voedingsmiddelen en analyse belemmeringen voor verduurzaming as well as the Agro-Nutri Monitor 2021 and the Agro-Nutri Monitor 2022. Currently he is leading one work package of the e-AgriMBA project which focuses on establishing a new AgriMBA program at the Technical University of Moldova.