Syngenta Group has appointed Dimitri Houtart as Head of External Communications for the leading world’s agricultural technology company, reporting to Saswato Das, Chief Communications Officer of the Group. He will be based in Syngenta’s offices in Jealott’s Hill, UK, and will be in charge of all aspects of external communications of the Group, operating in over 100 countries, including media relations and social media as well as digital media.
Dimitri Houtart joins Syngenta from the BBC where he spent 21 years in senior editorial leadership positions. For the last 10 years, he was the BBC Rural Affairs Champion as well as the executive editor for rural affairs, environment, food and natural history where he played a key role in the coverage of rural issues at the BBC. He was responsible for a portfolio of up to 1,000 programs a year and has earned numerous awards for his productions. He made a name as an environmentalist and sat on the board of King Charles’ responsible business network. He is on the advisory board of TABLE, a collaboration between Oxford University and other institutions, working with food system stakeholders to explore the future of food.
Alison Tudor-Ackroyd joins Syngenta Group as Head of Digital and Social Media, and will be based in Manchester, UK. Alison was most recently a director in the international communications team for China’s largest e-commerce company, Alibaba Group. She was also Managing Editor of its corporate newsroom, Alizila. Before moving into communications, Alison was an award-winning multimedia editor with over two decades of experience in journalism at publications including The Wall Street Journal, Reuters and the South China Morning Post. In her career, she has worked as a financial and business correspondent in Tokyo, London, Milan, Paris and Hong Kong.
Working together with Dimitri in managing media relations around the world are Beat Werder, Michelle Ng, Violaine Delli (based in Basel, Switzerland), Allen Shapard (Washington D.C., US) and Roger Zhang (Shanghai, China).