[Narrator]
Feeding a growing population is one of the biggest challenges of our time. Today, much of the world’s food is produced by smallholder farmers who often lack access to finance, markets, and modern tools. AgriConnect is a global initiative to help farmers move up the value chain, transforming smallholder farming into a stronger engine for jobs, growth, and food security. AgriConnect takes a system-wide approach. It’s rooted in better infrastructure, smarter policies, and finance that reaches the farm – powered by digital solutions. By working with governments, improving farms, giving farmers access to markets and information, and mobilizing private sector capital, AgriConnect unlocks investment and innovation. Building on decades of experience in agribusiness, the World Bank Group and partners aim to reach up to 300 million farmers by 2030. AgriConnect is about connecting people, markets, and the opportunity to feed the future and create jobs at scale.
[Beatriz Reis]
Good morning, everyone. Good morning. Thank you so much for joining us here in person and online as well. We have just kicked off the second session of our World Bank Group Priorities Series, this time focused on AgriConnect and how agri-tech and digital tools can help improve the lives of millions of farmers. So, without further ado, I’m going to call on stage our first speaker, the World Bank Group Global Director for Farming and Agribusiness, Anup Jagwani. Join me in welcoming him. Thank you.
[Applause]
[Anup Jagwani]
Good morning. Nice to see a lot of familiar faces here. So, you saw the video on our AgriConnect. And what is it? A flagship event to help farmers. We use… We look for many terms, from subsistence to surplus, move up the value chain, from better harvest and better incomes. Many ways to define how progress will be defined for the farmers. But here we are today to talk about turning that ambition into reality. What is that ambition? You see it on the screen. 300 million farmers. Clear goal: improve their lives, productivity, and livelihoods. We’re committed to doing this by 2030. Not very far. And we’re just starting. Why the urgency? There are 1.2 billion people in the developing world coming into the work stream in the next decade or so. We’ve got food demand rising by almost 30% by 2050. And we’ve got smallholder farmers who produce 35% of our food, who are still struggling to improve yields and improve their lives. So, AgriConnect is a strategy for us that is at the intersection of addressing all these challenges. And so, by expanding opportunities in the sector, we can improve farmers’ lives, create jobs, and feed the world. So, we can do all three things. You’ve heard of the three core pillars of the World Bank Group. If you have not, I’m going to repeat them for you, right? Foundational investments in physical and human capital, implementing policies that are more effective, and mobilizing private capital at scale. These are fundamental to our World Bank Group strategy, and we’re not doing this alone. What I like is, and all of you know the proverb, “You want to go fast, you go alone; and if you want to go far, you go together.” So, we have partners with us on this as well. Partners who have committed to the same goals as we have in reaching the farmers. So, results so far, as you can see, we’re just beginning. Seven million farmers reached since we announced this initiative last year. Four countries have already signed on compacts, and this is where we need the public sector to be an important part of this, and we’ve got a dozen more in the works that are going to be finalized, and up to 40 countries have committed to doing something on the public sector side to galvanize the private sector and bring about change in this space. One example is Senegal. Senegal, in the partnership, aims to help the country achieve food security for over 90% of its population and also create 800,000 jobs, clearly aligned with objectives we want to achieve as well. What drives success is focus, focus, focus. Focus on actionable plans and solutions, and that’s what we are here today to talk about. One of those solutions: agrotechnology. Agrotechnology has many different meanings. Many of you I see around the room are part of it in different ways, and whether it’s accessing finance, inputs, markets, payments, technology can really make a difference. And so, technology as a source of really bringing about change is an important piece that all of us need to look at and how we pursue it. So, with that, I’m going to ask Francisco Jardim, who some of you have met. He’s the Managing Partner at SP Ventures, and he has been investing in the agritech space for the last several years. Welcome, Francisco.
[Applause]
[Francisco Jardim]
It’s an honor to be here. Thank you, Anup.
[Anup Jagwani]
So, Francisco, you were going to give us an idea of what technology does, right? And essentially, we know many of us are scared, AI and technology actually reduce jobs, right? How are we going to increase jobs in this space?
[Francisco Jardim]
Anup, agritech is not only good for farming jobs, we think it’s essential. First of all, as we build a technology ecosystem around farming, we create a lot of new jobs, high-quality jobs, technological jobs. But beyond that, agritech is fundamental for preserving existing farmers’ jobs. As we have discussed today and over the past few days, farmers face unprecedented pressure, whether from climate disruption, geopolitical shocks making farming more uncertain, commodity price volatility, input price volatility compressing farmers’ margins. They need continuous innovation from local entrepreneurs of local science. That’s agritech. That’s what we need today.
[Anup Jagwani]
Okay, so I believe you have an example to show us of this, right?
[Francisco Jardim]
Yes, we are going to “tangibilize” this a little bit with an example that we’re going to show today. One of our portfolio companies, Aegro, which we invested slightly over 8 years ago, is the leading farm management software. So, they’re working with thousands and thousands of farmers, helping them manage their books, their accounting books, make day-to-day decisions. Last week, they launched a very simple yet powerful innovation that we think goes a very long way for smallholder farms. They launched a price comparison platform free of charge for small growers. It allows small growers in Brazil to enter this platform and consult exactly how much their peers within a 100-kilometer radius are paying for inputs, whether fertilizers, crop protection. Here we bring two examples that are sought in real time. One of one of the most commercialized fungicides in Brazil, Fox Xpro, and the other one of one of the most commercialized nitrogen fertilizers. And what we noticed within a 30-day hiatus is 30% to 40% price discrepancies. Now, if you guys know farmers’ margins and you think that smallholders are paying 30% to 40% more for their inputs, you will agree that it’s impossible for that farmer’s job to survive. And this is a very simple example of how, through proprietary data information, we can empower small farmers to level the playing field with industries, trading companies, and retailers.
[Anup Jagwani]
Well, that’s an amazing example, right? Technology, fingertips. Reminds me of another conversation I had last year at this very stage with a company called Arya, who we subsequently invested in, right, that helped farmers store the goods, provide capital, look at market prices in the different markets. So, this is similar in that you’re helping the farmers access knowledge that can help them make better decisions, right?
[Francisco Jardim]
Exactly. Farmers make money or lose money based on a few principles. First of all, managing their operations, and second, in how efficiently and qualitatively they can purchase their inputs. Fertilizers compose 30% to 40% of a farmer’s cost. So, if they’re not buying fertilizers at good prices, at competitive prices, it’s going to be very hard to keep those guys afloat.
[Anup Jagwani]
Okay, so we invested in that company. We’re working with you. We’ve got a few examples. How can we actually really scale this thing?
[Francisco Jardim]
It’s a good question. And if you look at agritech across the world, not just Latin America, it’s by far the most underfunded sector from a venture perspective comparable to GDP. So, there’s clearly a market failure. There’s a problem. We see a few structural issues. We can go through many. One of them is we need patient capital for agritech. As you guys know, farmers adopt technology in a different rhythm. They don’t buy technology 365 days of the year. They buy technology in very specific windows, seeding windows, planting windows, harvesting windows, and they usually like to pilot for one, two, sometimes three years before they feel comfortable scaling up the technology. So, we need longer cycles than traditional venture capital. This has been a major issue for technological adoption. Another, if we go to novel inputs, for example, biological inputs, we see three major sticking points that have made it hard to disseminate biologicals over traditional chemical inputs. First, access to technical assistance. Second, access to credit. And third, access to logistics, especially in continental-wide agriculture such as Brazil, such as India. And we have been investing heavily in these three segments, building a new financial services industry, tech-driven for farmers, ag-fintechs, logtechs, and also investing in digital platforms that can deliver agronomical science scaled and at affordable costs.
[Anup Jagwani]
Thank you, Francisco. So, platforms, and we were discussing the other day, how do you actually get all the platforms to talk to each other creates a, you know, different… otherwise you get different silos in this, right? What do you think about that?
[Francisco Jardim]
100%. Farming is one of the most… is one of the sectors that can benefit the most from interoperability. And we have been investing in this category as well, building common interoperability protocols. And this is an area where we believe the public sector and the private sector can collaborate, not only in providing rural connectivity, but in standard interoperability protocols.
[Anup Jagwani]
Okay, cool. So, everyone can talk to each other. I was given the example of, you’re using WhatsApp and you’re using your iMessage. They don’t talk to each other in sending messages easily. So, we need that interoperability, right?
[Francisco Jardim]
100%. And for farmers, they need the hybrid seed that they’re using to talk to the type of crop protection products they’re applying and integrate that with weather data to be able to make precision applications so they can use less inputs and get better results.
[Anup Jagwani]
I like how you grounded that, in the soil. Thank you. So, next piece was we’ve got a challenge, right? We’ve got AgriConnect as a global initiative. We know there are regional differences. How do you actually go about addressing those regional differences when you address technology or solutions?
[Francisco Jardim]
100%. So first of all, it’s important to remember farming is inherently a very local activity, whether it’s soil characteristics, whether it’s weather patterns, whether it’s human capital, whether it’s core infrastructure, regulatory frameworks. Region to region varies tremendously, and it’s hard to have a one-size-fits-all protocol. That said, I think over the past 10 years we’ve done a great job. The IFC has been an incredible partner in building local regional ecosystems, whether in Latin America, in India. Now, as we see our second and third vintages of agritech start to mature, we start to see the spillover effect. So, in our portfolio, we already start to see companies going from Brazil to Paraguay, to Bolivia, to Guatemala in Central America, and right now we’re about to invest in the first company in Brazil that is already present in West Africa. Building these cross-continental regional champions where we can leverage tropical agriculture innovation across emerging markets is something that we’re starting to see now, and we need growth capital and governance to accelerate it.
[Anup Jagwani]
Thank you. I like that differentiation where, of course, companies that start in one place take that solution and tailor it to another country, where they are nearby. Okay, so let’s get to the third pillar that we talked about. Three foundational pillars. The third pillar: mobilizing capital. Mobilizing capital for agri-technology. We’ve talked about… In the past, as we were framing AgriConnect, we talked about how so little capital goes into the sector in general. Less than 10% of the farmers have access to formal credit. And so, agri-technology, how can we get more capital into that space? How can we mobilize more capital into agri-technology?
[Francisco Jardim]
I think we need to solve the bottlenecks that are holding up private capital. One major bottleneck that we see is the slow adoption rate, and one way to accelerate the slow adoption rate is to fix the infrastructure challenges. One major infrastructure challenge that we have revolves around connectivity, smartphone penetration, and digital literacy for farmers. As we can build this infrastructure out, we can continue to build accelerated digital farmers’ agritech technologies.
[Anup Jagwani]
I should have talked to you earlier. We’ve been framing AgriConnect for a year and a half, and we said it’s integrated solutions that we need. We need to bring the non-agriculture, the infrastructure piece that becomes so important in this, right? Great. So, now we’ve touched on different subjects. We go back to our goal, 300 million farmers, right? It is a tall order. It is not easy to achieve. We just kicked off with 7 million right now. We’ve got a long way to go. We’ve got a really long way to go. We’re thinking of different ways. We’re thinking of agri-technology as a key way to get there, but I’d love to hear what you think in terms of achieving our goal of reaching the farmers, the 300 million farmers. Can we do it? What will it take? What needs to be done differently?
[Francisco Jardim]
So, first of all, I think our greatest bet and hope is to empower local entrepreneurs with local technologies solving local problems and let them fly and build these businesses across regions. But I’m going to bring a word of optimism because I’ve been doing this for a very long time and I have a very high perspective, macro look. When I started this, Anup, a little bit over 10 years ago, we were the only providers of capital to these agritech companies in Brazil. We were the only members, institutional capital, on these companies’ cap tables. This was from 2014 until 2020. In the fund that the IFC supported us between 2020 and 2024, we invested approximately 45 million dollars across 17 companies, and these companies went on to raise an additional 300 million dollars. So, the catalytic capital was one to seven. And now, with projects like AgriConnect, we see this momentum continuing. Our objective and our mission is to make agritech move from being an obscure niche investment asset class to become more mainstream. And I think projects like AgriConnect, they need this kind of mainstream agritech capital in order to succeed and reach 300 million.
[Anup Jagwani]
So, do we need to crowd in more? And different partners into this?
[Francisco Jardim]
Exactly. The partners that we’ve been seeing coming more and more besides the leading DFIs, we’ve been bringing more and more impact investors from across the world. We’ve been bringing large corporations from the agri space that understand they need to build these safety nets for rural livelihoods. And we’ve been bringing more and more pure-play traditional financial investors.
[Anup Jagwani]
Thank you, Francisco. Appreciate this conversation. Really great. So, with that, maybe we open it up to a few questions for you with the audience, if there’s anybody.
[Anup Jagwani]
Francisco and I will share one.
[Dr. L. G.]
Good morning. I’m Dr. L. G., private sector. I have a question. When you’re talking about 300 million farmers, are you talking about countries in the South Hemisphere, mainly Latin America, or you include Africa? If you include Africa, then I learned yesterday that 700 million African people don’t have zero… Well, have zero access to IT. Without Information Technology, which is everything related to communication, satellites, GPS, iPhones, Internet. So how come? What kind of million farmers are you talking about?
[Francisco Jardim]
100%. And this is exactly why, or one of the many reasons, why importing innovations in agriculture from the Northern Hemisphere, for example, has simply not worked in Brazil to be able to propose our 50-year agriculture miracle. In Brazil, the story of success that we had to create was we had to build a domestic ecosystem of hard science levered on Embrapa across the country to be able to get across certain milestones, whether in life science and in digital. And there needs to be a lot of work between entrepreneurs and the public sector because rural connectivity, even in Brazil, which is already more advanced than certain countries, is still very hard to do. So, we need to have different technologies that can bypass and lever. This is why it’s very important to strengthen local ecosystems, because the particularities are so different that you need local solutions. But once these solutions scale, we believe that they can lever and they can build regional platforms. So, focusing on our regional ecosystem, but then cross-pollinizing into different ones. And we’re starting to see the first companies from our vintages start to be cross-pollinized across Angola, across Senegal.
[Anup Jagwani]
Yes, the goal is across the world, 300 million people, not just Latin America, across the world.
[Audience member 1]
[Unintelligible]
World Bank. You spoke about agritech, and it’s a field that’s progressing very rapidly. In areas like precision agriculture, agri-fintech, robotic agriculture. Is there an area that is specifically very exciting, you find very exciting in terms of its potential to impact the smallholder farmer when it comes to their livelihoods and productivity? If you could pick one area of agritech, what would it be? And for both of you.
[Francisco Jardim]
I’m going to pick two because I’m just so excited that I can’t contend with just one. First, I’m going to talk about ag-fintech. Farming is the most working capital-intensive business, major category economics. It’s also one that is mired with market failures. Why? Because farming is intrinsically very complex to price. You have biological risk, you have climate risk, you have commodity price risk, geopolitical risk, FX risk, and traditional lenders have had a lot of hard time. And in many cases, governments have not gotten the right subsidies in, to be able to fix these market failures. So, building this new tech-driven financial services industry, and in this case, Brazil has been an epicenter of financial innovation, has been a core. 30% of our last fund was allocated towards this category. Another one that is particularly important today is building a new biological input industry. This is to complement and reduce vulnerabilities of traditional chemical fertilizers, which are very susceptible, vulnerable supply chains, and also transition to a low-carbon regenerative agriculture system that is high productivity and climate resilient.
[Anup Jagwani]
And we need those fertilizers now, the biologicals now, especially now in the price well, fertilizer, synthetic fertilizer going up.
[Francisco Jardim]
For sure, 100%. And just to give an example, most countries have similar vulnerabilities. Brazil imports over 80% of its fertilizers, and most of them from very vulnerable supply chains.
[Femi Osidele]
Can you hear me? Can you hear me? Okay. This question is actually for Anup. My name is Femi Osidele. I’m a hydrologist and I work with a research group in California. I’m going to add another one to your terminology and say, “think global, act local.” And so how do you… If you’re thinking about AgriConnect in the context of the 300 million target globally, and yet you’re only at 2.3%, and we have examples, Brazil, Senegal… What’s the coordination challenge that the World Bank faces in really doing this global objective, whereas the actions are local within individual countries and farmers?
[Anup Jagwani]
Thank you for that question. The way AgriConnect, and I mentioned in my opening, we have these compacts with governments. Where we are starting is actually local. We’re starting at country level to say what’s needed in this country to move the agriculture sector, and create jobs, and add value, and help the farmers improve lives. So, it starts at a local level. All the plans, while it’s a global initiative, each of the programs starts locally, and then the global teams help support the regional units, the country units, in bringing knowledge, bringing capacity, bringing solutions, and working closely and moving knowledge across different boundaries so that we can have greater impact. But these start local and are operated locally.
[Francisco Jardim]
If I can just give one suggestion on this topic, one area that we see this cross-border collaboration where we think the World Bank could be instrumental in regulatory standardization frameworks for biological inputs. We see that biological frameworks in many countries are still regulated as if they were chemical products, and this creates enormous challenges of getting to market. Brazil, in this case, is very advanced for multiple reasons, and it’s the largest biological market, huge biodiversity. This is very multi-segment because it demands agronomical science understanding, food and drug administration knowledge, environmental knowledge. So, it’s tough, but it’s something that we should see tremendous cross-border pollination of different biological technologies.
[Anup Jagwani]
And that’s part of the goal, which policies work well. A key pillar of AgriConnect, those of you not familiar, is policy. There’s 800 billion dollars in subsidies going to the sector. How can we repurpose some of them for better use so that we can have climate-smart agriculture, we can reach farmers, improve lives? The goal is really to leverage policy for greater impact.
[Audience member 2]
Francisco, this is a question for you. You talked about patient capital. I’d love to hear you unpack the whole idea of patient capital a bit more, specifically relating to blended finance and how it can help in the ag-tech ecosystem. Then perhaps talk about very quickly how we can, as the World Bank Group and the IFC together, bring this together to this ecosystem.
[Francisco Jardim]
For sure. When we say patient capital, one thing that I want to make clear, we’re not talking about sacrificing financial returns. It’s a longer investment horizon, but for multiple reasons, it’s also an incredible investment opportunity. But you need to take the comparison outside of the box of comparing this asset class with traditional consumer technologies and enterprise software technologies, etcetera. So, first of all, it’s about looking at a broader horizon, and we know it’s very difficult when you’re comparing asset classes within the same box to create a new box. So, I think that’s critical. In terms of blended finance, we’ve been seeing several initiatives from players like the Green Climate Fund that are finally looking at ag-tech as a climate finance instrument. And this makes total sense. Agriculture is by far the most underfunded segment of climate finance, even though it is by far the most vulnerable and exposed sector to climate change. I cannot think of a more important climate adaptation investment initiative than ag-tech. So, looking at these two and understanding from a comprehensive perspective that it’s a longer-term asset, deliver solid financial returns, but at the same time, you have to see it as a climate finance instrument, I think are critical things that we’ve learned and we’ve been able to convey to several of our investors.
[Anup Jagwani]
I agree, Francisco. We need other sources of capital here, climate capital, because 30% of the emissions, approximately, come from this sector and less than 4% of the climate finance goes to this sector. We have somebody here.
[Audience member 3]
Hi, my name is
[unintelligible]
. I’m a PhD student in agribusiness. And I’m from Pakistan. In Pakistan, we have a challenge for the smallholder farmers, it’s a middleman challenge. Like, 99% of smallholder farmers do not have access to the wholesale market. So, I’m curious about how this agritech can help the smallholder farmers to remove this middleman challenge, especially for the Pakistani smallholder farmers? Thank you.
[Francisco Jardim]
This is a very good question because it’s exactly what we see in Brazil. What this technology that we demonstrated was the fruit of exactly this assessment. Smallholder farmers, even in mature developing economies such as Brazil in the agriculture space, face many more intermediaries that take more margin and more, they hurt the data flow and they hurt supplies. So, when you do have a shortfall of supply, such as we’re facing now with fertilizers, smallholders, not only do they get higher prices, but they’re the ones most vulnerable to not being able to get access. So, distribution is key, and I go back to those three points that we need to build further distribution, because it’s not about just getting the products to them. We need to get technical assistance, we need to get them financing, because farmers need 200, 240, 270 days’ working capital, and we need to get the physical distribution. So, in Brazil, our lesson has been that we need to invest in agritech that solves these three bottlenecks. And you dissolve these three, and once you do that, you don’t solve 100% the problem, but you drastically reduce friction. So, we get more credit access to these guys, we get more logistics optimization, and we get technical assistance for digital platform distributions. That’s been an important lesson that we’ve had in Brazil to share.
[Shriram]
Hi, can you hear me? Francisco, thank you so much. My name is Shriram. I’m from Africa, based in East Africa. The context of Africa is, in East Africa, an average Kenyan farmer is a little over 60 years, and 65% of the farmers are women. You spoke about seven different risks, 16 different point solutions in ag-tech. How do you see the farmer able to understand all of this? They have farming to do and they have a family to take care of. So, what is the need, or how did Brazil go about creating a human infrastructure at the last mile that can connect these point solutions and can solve the problem?
[Francisco Jardim]
That’s a really good question. And I’ll tell you, this is one of the advantages that we see in Brazil versus, for example, the United States. Farmer average ages. In Brazil, we’re talking about 48, and that really makes it easier to get the products across. So, I understand 100% where you’re coming from, and it’s a challenge. We’ve tested and tried multiple different channels to get these technologies across. We’ve worked with the public sector. In Brazil, you have technical assistance-related organizations for extension, agricultural, agronomical supplies. We’ve worked with private agronomists that offer consulting services. Trying to empower them with technology so that they can offer their services to smaller holders instead of just large accounts. We’ve worked with input retailers so that they can shift and transition their business models away from selling commodity inputs to also selling services. We’ve worked with the cooperatives. In Brazil, the cooperative model has been very successful, especially in the south and southeast of Brazil, but it’s another challenge for the regulatory framework. There’s not one size fits all. These were the experiences that we had in Brazil. It involved multiple different channels, whether we’re talking about digital or physical products, but we’ve been trying them for 10 years and we’ve had a lot of success in individual plays.
[Anup Jagwani]
Thank you, Francisco. And with that, we have to end this conversation. Thank you very much. Appreciate this and having you here with us. Thank you all for joining us.
[Applause]
[Lively music]
