Financing farm renovation: How to build resilience using a blend of capital
This report by Root Capital explains how a blend of capital can help build resilience against a dwindling supply and rising demand in commodities such as coffee, cacao, and tea. La Roya, also known as coffee leaf rust, is a crippling crop disease that continues to spread across Latin America. In 2016, it is expected that global consumers will drink more coffee than ever before. With growing populations and rising incomes, demand for coffee — as well as cocoa, tea, and other agricultural commodities — will continue to increase in the coming years. Over the past three years leaf rust has affected the lives of millions of farmers and farmworkers. The challenges resulting from this has started a downward cycle of low productivity, reduced income, and underinvestment that often leads to migration, deforestation, and other desperate measures. To address these many challenges, Root Capital leveraged public-private partnerships and developed the Coffee Farmer Resilience Initiative (CFRI). This report shares learnings from Root Capital’s model with CFRI, what they’ve done over the past two years for the Initiative, and what they continue to learn. The report states that investment in agriculture—perhaps more than any other sector—has the potential to bring about unprecedented change today and into the future, from food security and nutrition to environmental sustainability and economic growth.
The executive summary is also available in Spanish.