Panel, Fireside Chat
Systems Finance for Sustainable Development | Global Conference 2024
Milken InstituteSimon Winter, Jake Cusack, Rini Greenfield, Madhur Jain, Daniela Kandel, Jake Levine
- The Syngenta Foundation is establishing a Smallholder Action Coalition on Climate Adaptation to coordinate finance deployment, leveraging innovations from public and private sectors to strengthen rural entrepreneurship in emerging markets for underserved farmers.
- A specific co-creation program with BRAC aims to transition one million smallholder farmers across two vulnerable landscapes in Bangladesh by early 2025 pending Green Climate Fund approval, building on a proven business case with 10,000 farmers supported by the International Water Resources Group and Coca-Cola Foundation.
- The foundation envisions this initial phase scaling to a five-million farmer transition that could mobilize approximately one billion dollars, while aggregating benefits such as carbon sequestration (projected at $700 annually per farmer) and financial incentives could potentially double smallholder income.
- Varaha Ag currently operates at nearly 600,000 acres and plans expansion into Nepal, Bangladesh, India, and Kenya, identifying a financing gap of hundreds of millions of dollars to scale proof-of-concept projects and requiring lower interest rates and low-premium insurance to catalyze the transition.
- The Evergreen Innovation Platform seeks to adapt ag-tech solutions from the UK, Israel, the US, and India, aiming to shift investment from sporadic company funding to financing system intermediaries to mitigate pioneer risk and utilize carbon income to increase farmer earnings.
- Rini Greenfield anticipates a significant surge in agricultural innovation over the next two years driven by the Inflation Reduction Act and consumer willingness to spend an additional 400 basis points of their wallet share.
- Cross Boundary expects nearly all deals to involve public or philanthropic capital, aiming to financially incentivize positive externalities through deal-by-deal structures or subsidies, noting that first-loss capital addresses perceived risks but not structural value chain issues.
- The US DFC, authorized to invest up to $60 billion in low-income emerging markets, expects to double its $1 billion food security financing goal by 2026 and is establishing the Office of Catalytic Investments to address enabling environment challenges.
- To move from serving millions to hundreds of millions of farmers and financing in trillions, the US DFC must address structural barriers including high costs of capital and local currency hedging, requiring participation from multilateral development banks and central banks.
- Industry participants identify critical needs for growth equity at scale, the aggregation of opportunities to ensure adequate capital deployment sizes, and the transition from serving millions of smallholders to hundreds of millions through systematic financing structures.