Ms Maria Julia OLIVA

Deputy Director, Union for Ethical BioTrade

Julia is Deputy Director at the Union for Ethical BioTrade (UEBT), a non-profit supporting companies working with ingredients from biodiversity in the food and beverages, beauty, fragrance and flavour and natural pharmaceutical sectors. Julia has been with UEBT, as part of its senior management team, since 2009. She is a trained lawyer with internationally recognised expertise on legal and policy issues linked to biodiversity. At UEBT, she currently leads work on membership, policy and access and benefit sharing (ABS). She also coordinates projects focused on training and technical support, involving different international organisations, governments and companies. Julia is also on the Board of Directors of ISEAL, the global membership organisation for credible sustainability standards. She grew up in Mendoza, Argentina, and has an LLM degree, cum laude, from Lewis & Clark Law School in the United States.