Over the course of his career, Jason Clay has worked on a family farm, taught at Harvard University, worked in the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and spent more than twenty years working with human rights and environmental nongovernmental organizations (NGOs).

Clay spent more than a decade developing research methods to document and predict human rights abuses, genocide and ethnocide, social conflict, and human-made famines.

In the 1980s he was one of the inventors of green marketing and established a trading company within Cultural Survival in which he developed markets for rainforest products with nearly 200 companies in the United States and Europe (including such products as Rainforest Crunch with Ben & Jerry’s). In 1996 he began to research ways to reduce the impacts of shrimp aquaculture. In 1999 he created the Shrimp Aquaculture and the Environment Consortium (with the World Wildlife Fund, World Bank, Food and Agricultural Organization, and National Aquaculture Centres for Asia and the Pacific), which he codirected, to identify and analyze better management practices that address the environmental and social impacts of shrimp aquaculture. 

Clay received his B.A. in anthropology at Harvard University, studied economics and geography at the London School of Economics, and anthropology and international agriculture at Cornell University, where he received his Ph.D. in 1979. Clay was founder and editor (1980-1992) of the award-winning Cultural Survival Quarterly, the largest circulation anthropology and human rights publication in the world. He is the author or co-author of 12 books and more than 300 articles.