Chris Corry, U.S. Grains Council senior director of international operations, is marking his 25th year at the Council with a novel change: He will retire immediately after the July Vancouver meeting to go into business for himself as a real estate agent and developer. He will work with his brother-in-law, rehabbing properties in Virginia and the Washington, D.C., area.

“Chris came to the Council right out of graduate school,” remembers Tom Sleight, USGC president and CEO. “He followed me as a technical coordinator, and as he took on tough challenges and advanced at the Council, he has been an outstanding asset and won us innumerable friends around the world.”

“Within a few months of starting at the Council, I knew that this is what I wanted to do in my career,” Corry said. “I’ve really enjoyed working with staff and members to develop strategy-based marketing plans and seeing them implemented.

“There is nothing like waking up in the morning knowing that you’ve moved the peg, that you can see results based on logical, defensible plans to get from A to B.”

Soon after joining as a technical coordinator, Corry was tapped as the second project director for a joint Council-FAS project to build a commercial-scale poultry operation and dairy farm in Algeria, overseeing some 20 U.S. contractors. This project disrupted by the first Gulf War, when he had to evacuate his household to Vienna, where he remained for seven years.

Then, in the turmoil following the fall of the Iron Curtain, he was re-assigned first as a regional director for Eastern Europe, then as regional director for the Mediterranean, and ultimately as director for all of Africa. In 1997, when the Council closed the Vienna office, Corry was instrumental in opening and organizing the new office in Tunisia, where he served until assuming his current position in Washington, D.C., in 2000.