The Executive President of CAF-Development Bank for Latin America and the Caribbean, Sergio Díaz-Granados, and the Director General of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), Manuel Otero, agreed to strengthen the alliance between the two institutions, which will be based on a renewed action plan focused on the agricultural sector.
Díaz-Granados met with Otero at IICA headquarters in San José, Costa Rica, along with other authorities from CAF and the agency specialized in agricultural and rural development to establish new priorities for joint and complementary work.
“It is very important to renew the alliance between CAF, as the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, and IICA, as an institute that brings together all policy and innovation capabilities. We have established an action plan that will allow us to present in March the coordinated strategy of what we want to do with respect to rural and agricultural development and plan activities throughout the year so that we can strengthen Latin America as a solution region based on its strengths in the sector,” said Díaz-Granados after the meeting.
As a central focus of the strengthened CAF-IICA alliance, Díaz-Granados emphasized building resilience in agriculture in Latin America and the Caribbean and understanding the problems caused by droughts, floods and other extreme events, in order to prepare agriculture for the challenges the region faces.
Díaz-Granados and Otero agreed on a second axis associated with the aging of the rural population and the strengthening of family farming, seeking to contribute to improving producers’ income through the construction of better chains and greater added value.
“The CAF-IICA alliance is based on an action plan with concrete actions that start from the recognition of the role of agriculture in a new sustainable development strategy that emerges from the continent itself and that offers the capitalization of a new frontier of knowledge with farmers as protagonists,” said Manuel Otero, who emphasized the capacity for complementarity between CAF and IICA.
This aspect was also highlighted by Díaz-Granados, who, accompanied by Vice-Presidents Christian Asinelli and Antonio Silveira, and the new representative in Costa Rica, Carolina Rueda, also emphasized the importance of institutional coordination and the ability to bring together wills and knowledge. “What IICA does is a perfect complement to a development bank like CAF, which is a regional bank, and at the same time has the institution that has worked basically to understand the trends and vulnerabilities of a sector as important to development as agriculture. The two institutions fit together perfectly and this allows us to offer a much more ambitious package of solutions for the region, because we are presenting the best diagnostics accompanied by financial tools,” he concluded.
