Speaker Profile
Jorge A. Illingworth G.
Born in Guayaquil, Ecuador in 1963; he graduated at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, Georgia (USA) with a BA in Industrial Engineering in 1985. That same year he joined a very important industrial group in Ecuador as head of the Industrial Engineering Department in charge of cost control, productivity and quality at 5 industrial plants.
In 1988 he started his own company in the aquaculture industry growing shrimp at his farm of 120 hectares in the Gulf of Guayaquil. For the next 12 years he also owned a shrimp hatchery and a family partnership shrimp processing plant for export.
In 1991 the attended post-graduate Program in Agroindustrial Management at INCAE in Costa Rica.
By 2000 he started his career in business representation when he became Executive Director of the National Aquaculture Chamber in Ecuador, second largest export sector. By August 2002 he joined the National Banana Exporters Association also as its executive director
In September 2003 he was appointed Executive Vicepresident of the Guayaquil Chamber of Industries. In 2004 he attended successfully the Export Consultant Program at the CBI-Netherlands. He has also been part of many Trade Promotion Programs and WTO regulations training programs.
Appointed Viceminister of Industries in February of 2005, he also joined Negotiating Team for the FTA with the USA in the Market Access and Customs Procedures tables.
In September of that same year, he was designated Minister of Trade, Industries and Competitiveness by then President Alfredo Palacio. He successfully led Ecuador’s trade dispute against the EU regarding the long standing dispute on market access for bananas. Finally by January 2006 a tariff only system came into place in Europe, which has benefited tremendously small and medium banana producers in Ecuador. In addition he started a procedure against the USA regarding an unfair and illegal antidumping tariff imposed on ecuadorian shrimp. The strategy Illingworth and his team designed and implemented later proved effective when the USA was ordered by WTO to take down the antidumping measures. He also was the president of COMEXI (National Council for Trade and Investment) while being Minister and also later on as a private sector representative. Illingworth left the Ministry of Trade late May 2006,
For many years Illingworth was a member of the Board of Directors of the “Corporación para la Promoción de Exportaciones e Inversiones del Ecuador-CORPEI” representing the private sector and also as Minister of Trade.
By July 2006 he returned to the Guayaquil Chamber of Industries as executive vicepresident, where he stayed until September 2007 when he joined the International Labour Office-ILO as its Senior Employer Organization Specialist for the Andean Countries based in Lima, Perú.
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