Blog Category

Agricultural Finance

Identifying guidelines for the design of conditional credit programs to promote sustainable agricultural practices in Latin America

Sep 3rd, 2024 • by Daniel Eduardo Vergara Mateus, Jorge Armando Rueda Gallardo, Brian McNamara, and Valeria Piñeiro

The complex challenge of increasing food production while mitigating carbon dioxide emissions, building resilience to climate change, and reducing the burden of agriculture on natural resources requires innovative approaches. Promising strategies include increasing access to mechanization and adopting modern fertilization processes that contribute to climate change adaptation efforts, or the use of improved seeds.

Re-Examining Financing for Food Security: 2024 SOFI Report Released

Aug 28th, 2024 • by Sara Gustafson

As the world edges closer to the 2030 Sustainable Development Goal deadline, progress on achieving Zero Hunger has stalled, according to the FAO’s 2024 flagship report, The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World.

As many as 757 million people may have experienced hunger in 2023, while 2.33 billion experienced moderate or severe food insecurity. In 2022, as many as 2.8 billion were not able to afford a nutritious diet. The situation is particularly dire in low-income countries, especially for rural populations, women, youth, and Indigenous Peoples.

Fostering Agricultural Value Chain Finance: Lessons from Southeast Asia

Nov 29th, 2021 • by Alan de Brauw

Several constraints limit the ability of smallholder farmers in low and middle income countries (LMICs) to reach their production potential. One such constraint is access to formal finance; smallholders and other agricultural value chain participants frequently cannot access credit necessary to invest in new crops or technologies and deal with risks and shocks and/or savings products necessary to safely carry wealth from harvest to planting.

Building consensus for systemic change: The role of donors in food systems transformation

Sep 21st, 2021 • by Swati Malhotra and Sara Gustafson

Despite tremendous progress made in the last decade to produce enough food to meet the demands of the growing population, around 811 million people lived in hunger in 2020 and nearly half of the world’s population lacked year-round access to adequate food due to climate change, poverty, and the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the 2021 State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World (SOFI) report.