Latin America in 2020: Stronger, more sustainable farmers

Although we had to maintain social distance and avoid coming into physical contact with each other in 2020, we were actually closer to our farmers than ever in order to help them get through the pandemic. For example, we were able to provide safety toolkits paid for by an emergency fund, but we also hired more local consultants to reinforce our local teams. Because farmers need to be able to reach us in these trying times.

We support farmers’ cooperatives to become stronger through diversification. Farmers who only grow cocoa or coffee beans are extremely vulnerable to fluctuations in the global market and prices. By diversifying to grow other crops as well, farmers and their cooperatives can better adapt to sudden drops in prices.

In addition to economic and social changes, since 2019 we have placed even more emphasis on our ecological impact. We increasingly support projects that improve the farmer’s influence on their environment. In Peru, for example, we participated on multi-stakeholder initiatives to address key sustainability issues on the value chain of cocoa; these interventions will hopefully prevent further loss of biodiversity as well as providing incentives to smallholder farmers to increase carbon sequestration.

Despite the coronavirus, most farmers ended up having a good year in 2020. They shipped enough products, paid back their loans, could benefit from a better price than the local market price and from member services provided by producer organizations. They are accustomed to setbacks, and with the right support they proved to be extremely resilient.

By financing both farmers’ cooperatives and microfinance organizations, we contribute to making farmers stronger socially. That’s because as members of a cooperative, they have a sense of belonging and often receive support as if they were family. Many cooperatives have an emergency fund to help members who have bad harvests, and some even offer health care services. Many of the microfinance organizations we support also work to improve the social well-being of the farmers they finance.

We will continue to pay even more attention to climate change in 2021. Many farmers have seen their soils damaged by drought, extreme rainfall or erosion. In addition to technical assistance, we are increasingly emphasizing technological solutions by agtech companies that can help farmers with services such as timely weather forecasts and targeted messaging to support them throughout the crop cycle.

We are also paying more attention to the younger generation, who often don’t feel motivated to take over their parents’ farms. But as the likely successors to their parents, they are vital for the continuity of global food production and the generation that will play a part in innovation of each sector. We therefore support more and more projects that teach them how to farm intelligently or to become an entrepreneur in the same crop value chain, for example by marketing their own brand of coffee with their own coffee bar.