Photo of Anita Campion, taken at the 2014 Cracking the Nut Conference
“With climate change, there are a lot of places in Africa and Asia that are going to be facing food deficits… Latin America will become part of the solution,” says Anita Campion, CEO of Connexus Corporation, at the 6th annual “Cracking the Nut” conference, an international forum in which experts in the realm of financing sustainable agriculture met this week at the Inter-American Development Bank’s DC headquarters.
In the following interview, Ms. Campion, who is also the lead organizer of the event, shares her thoughts on the most urgent global challenges related to climate-smart agriculture and food security, and why she thinks the Latin American and Caribbean region and the IDB will be key in addressing them.
Why is the conference called ‘Cracking the Nut’?
We named it ‘Cracking the Nut’ when we did the first version 6 years ago and at that point we were trying to crack the first nut of how to facilitate agricultural financing, to small holders especially... We still haven’t completely cracked that nut.
This year there were three main topics: Regenerating Rural and Agricultural Landscapes, Financing Environmentally Sustainable Development, and Encouraging Investment in Climate-Smart Agriculture. How were they chosen?
This [conference] was largely about climate-smart agriculture, and we also wanted to allow for the investment aspect that is beyond just finance. I think when people hear the word financing, they think only of lending, whereas investment is much broader.
How are these topics relevant for Latin America and the Caribbean?
The first big thing that came out in the conference was that Latin America is becoming the future bread basket of the world, and there are certain countries that have strong potential for producing a lot of food very cost-effectively, Brazil and Colombia are at the top of the list, and others like Peru and Chile are on the horizon. With climate change, there are a lot of places in Africa and Asia that are going to be facing food deficits. So, Latin America will become part of the solution.
What are the main challenges in Latin America when we think about climate-smart agriculture and sustainability?
I guess the biggest one is that there is such a wide variety of sizes in countries in Latin America and obviously Brazil because it’s so large, has an advantage in some way. But then there are countries in Central America and the Caribbean that have a disadvantage because not only are they very small but they are the ones being affected the most by climate change, and they just don’t have the funds to invest in making the improvements.
One of the issues brought up in the conference was migration from rural areas to urban areas. Do you think there are specific challenges that will come as a consequence?
That was one of the things Dr. Nancy Stetson [US Special Representative for Global Food Security] talked about in her keynote address. Because there is only so much land on the planet, the price of land is going up, which is driving the price of food up, and it’s only going to go in that direction in the long term. If you are in an urban area you have to figure out how to pay for that food you need and you don’t necessarily get a pay increase that is in line with the increases we have seen in food prices. And so, we had the big food crisis in 2008, and I think we are going to see more of that in the future. Maybe that’s what the next Cracking the Nut needs to focus on.
If Latin America is to take a role in solving issues of food security, how can we do it in a sustainable way?
That is the big, tricky question. What happened with the 2008 food crisis was that because there wasn’t enough rice, countries started shutting the borders, not willing to trade what rice they had because they wanted to make sure that people from their country were food secure. And yet, what that ended up creating was an artificially high costs for the price of certain foods that actually could have been available if we allowed the free trade to flow a little bit more. But that’s not an easy thing to solve because local politics are “take care of your own first.”
How can the IDB play a role in addressing these issues?
In a market research Conexus has recently done for the IDB, we studied value chains: we looked at agricultural equipment, focusing largely on drip irrigation because it has such an important role in climate-smart agriculture; we [also] looked at fruits and dairy. We assessed the changes coming in the future, the impact global climate change would have, in order to identify what might be good investment projects for the IDB.
Because the IDB has such strong relationships with governments, it has a unique opportunity to leverage those governmental relationships to facilitate private sector partners. For example, when we were in Brazil, I heard that a limitation to getting smallholders’ products to market is the infrastructure, and that a number of large companies would be interested in investing to help facilitate the flow of those products to market. But that’s the kind of large investment that would take some coordination at a national level, and that’s what IDB is great at.
Condensed and edited from a longer interview