[4] At Albany, Bertini was president of the College Republicans and worked full-time in the last gubernatorial campaign of Nelson A. Rockefeller.
[5] Bertini was appointed in 1992 by the Secretary-General of the United Nations and the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization, on the recommendation of President George H. W. Bush.
She is credited with assisting hundreds of millions of victims of wars and natural disasters throughout Africa, Asia, Latin America, the Middle East, and parts of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union.
In particular, she was widely praised for her efforts to end famine in North Korea; averting starvation in Afghanistan by delivering enormous amounts of urgently needed food aid in 2001; ensuring the provision of food supplies during the crises in Bosnia and Kosovo; and in 2000, averting the mass starvation that threatened 16 million people in the Horn of Africa.
[8] She also chaired the UN System Standing Committee on Nutrition and served as the Secretary General's envoy twice: for drought in the Horn of Africa and for humanitarian needs in Gaza and the West Bank.
GADI has been an influential voice in US government circles advocating for new priorities for support for poor farmers within international development programs.
Bush administration, Catherine Bertini served as Acting Assistant Secretary of the Family Support Administration in the United States Department of Health and Human Services, and as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Food and Consumer Services at the United States Department of Agriculture.
President George W. Bush appointed and President Barack Obama reappointed her to the Board for International Food and Agricultural Development (BIFAD), where she advised USAID for nine years (2006-2015) on agriculture and higher education issues pertinent to food insecurity in developing countries.
[19] In 2012, Catherine Bertini was named to serve on the State Department's five-member Accountability Review Board that examined the facts and circumstances of the attacks on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya.
She taught graduate courses in Managing Change in the United Nations, Girl's Education, International Organizations, Executive Leadership, Food Security, and Post-Conflict Reconstruction.