Nicholas Everett Hollis, born May 11, 1944, in Randolph, Vermont, became a leading trade expansionist over the last three decades of the twentieth century sponsoring dozens of high-level trade/investment missions and international conferences utilizing influential business and government positions in organizations, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, National Association of Manufacturers (NAM), Industry Center for Trade Negotiations (ICTN), U.S. Department of State/Agency for International Development (USAID), Agri-Energy Roundtable (AER), and most recently as president of The Agribusiness Council (ABC), a nonprofit organization founded by Henry Heinz II in 1967.HALP 2010701008467 The eldest son of Everett L. Hollis, a prominent Chicago attorney, and Marion Armstrong Jennings, a fiction writer, Hollis grew up outside Washington, D.C., and New York City, attended public schools and received a Bachelor of Arts degree in history (with honors) from DePauw University (1966) and a master's degree in international affairs from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies (1968).

He soon conceived a bold project aimed at strengthening U.S. export financing programs, organized a special task force of leading bankers and industrialists and recruited a top Caterpillar Tractor Company executive (V.V.

Hollis went on to staff the highly successful U.S.-European Businessmen’s Conference held in March 1972 (Paris) which brought him into direct interaction with some of the world’s top industrialists and formed an ongoing US-EC Business Council.

[2] A third report and proposed framework for industry-government preparations had a significant influence on the consultative process adapted by the U.S. Department of Commerce and the Office of the Special Trade Representative.

[4] Hollis also gained prominence during this period by organizing the first large conferences convening U.S. business leaders with Soviet and Arab industrial and agricultural counterparts which later fostered highly successful trade/industrial follow-up missions to the USSR [5] and various countries in the North Africa and Persian Gulf region in 1973–1974, respectively.

[6] In mid-1975 Hollis relinquished his NAM position to become chief executive of the newly established ICTN with over 150 corporate sponsors and moved to Switzerland to set up its Geneva office near the MTN.

Hollis returned to Washington, and later resigned this position after arranging for a freelance journalist to forward Geneva reports to ICTN members – and began working for Jimmy Carter’s election campaign.

Hollis’ private meetings with senior government officials in many countries convinced him of the need to formalize trilateral assistance utilizing U.S. expertise and OPEC petrodollars in African agricultural projects, and he pioneered several efforts in Sudan and Somalia after announcing the initiative at a U.S. commercial counselors’ conference in Nairobi in February 1978.

These experiences led Hollis to found the Agri-Energy Roundtable (AER), a multilateral dialogue forum convening food and energy-surplus country officials with business leaders in 1980.

In addition to its annual meeting and task force programs on renewable energy, non-conventional finance, environment, new agricultural and food technologies, AER began establishing independent counterpart associations via regional conferences (India, Philippines, Uganda, Nigeria, the Gambia, the Persian Gulf and Egypt).

[7][8] Both AER, and more recently ABC, have received grants from the World Bank, UNIDO and U.S. government agencies to provide training and expand the network of indigenous counterpart associations.