Mr Stiefel works in Geneva as Executive Director of WSP International, a private organisation affiliated with the UN, which uses action-research and consensus building methodology to assist local and national actors in war-torn societies in consolidating peace and rebuilding their countries. It also assists the UN and the international community in better supporting them in this task. In the early 1970s he was a freelance journalist and consultant in Southeast Asia. In 1986 he resigned from employment with the UN to spend five years as a farmer on a traditional dry-land subsistence farm in the Algarve, motivated by the desire to gain practical field experience of development issues. Mr Stiefel is also an International Trustee of A Rocha International.