Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture

Agribusiness Agriculture Sustainable development

CAF and IICA renew and intensify their partnership through a plan of action to strengthen Latin American and Caribbean agriculture

Tiempo de lectura: 3 mins.
IICA Director General, Manuel Otero, and Executive President of CAF, Sergio Díaz-Granados.

San Jose, 5 February 2025 (IICA) – The Executive President of the CAF-Development Bank of 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 build on the partnership between the two institutions, primarily through a new plan of action targeting the agriculture sector.

Díaz-Granados met with Otero at IICA Headquarters in San Jose, Costa Rica, along with other senior officials from CAF and from the specialized organization in agricultural and rural development, to establish new priorities for joint and complementary actions.

After the meeting, Díaz-Granados noted that, “It is critical that we renew this partnership between CAF, as the Development Bank of Latin America and the Caribbean, and IICA, as an institution that brings together a wide range of policy and innovation capacities. We have devised an action plan that will allow us to present a coordinated strategy in March, outlining our plans for rural and agricultural development and proposing activities throughout the year that will allow us to revitalize Latin America as a region that can use its strengths in the sector to provide solutions”.

According to Díaz-Granados, key areas of focus of the renewed CAF-IICA partnership are actions to build agricultural resilience in Latin America and the Caribbean and to gain an understanding of the challenges resulting from droughts, flooding and other extreme events, as a means of preparing agriculture to tackle the challenges facing the region.

Díaz-Granados and Otero also agreed that another area of focus would be the aging rural population and the need to strengthen family farming, by helping to boost the income of farmers through the creation of better chains and greater value addition.

On the other hand, Manuel Otero, in noting how the capacities of CAF and IICA complement each other, maintained that, “The CAF-IICA partnership is based on a roadmap of concrete actions that recognize the role of agriculture in a new sustainable development strategy arising from the hemisphere. The strategy also seeks to capitalize on the new frontier of knowledge, with farmers as the protagonists”.

Díaz-Granados, who was accompanied by CAF vice-presidents Christian Asinelli and Antonio Silveira, and the new representative in Costa Rica, Carolina Rueda, also echoed this idea. He stressed the importance of institutional coordination and the pooling of efforts and expertise”.

In closing, he reflected that, “The activities of IICA—an institute that has sought to understand the trends and vulnerability of a sector like agriculture, which is so critical for development—perfectly complement the actions of a regional development bank like CAF.  Our institutions are a perfect fit for each other, which allows us to offer the region a much more ambitious portfolio of solutions, because they are based on the best diagnostics, backed by financial tools”.

More information:
Institutional Communication Division.
comunicacion.institucional@iica.int

Share

Related news​

Asunción, Paraguay

September 16, 2025

Nidia González, who champions the empowerment of women farmers in Paraguay and strives to raise living standards in her community, has now been recognized as an IICA Leader of Rurality of the Americas 

Nidia is President of the Comité de Santo Domingo, a group that seeks to improve the income and standard of living of the entire community.

Tiempo de lectura: 3mins

Madrid, España

September 16, 2025

The IICA Director General, during a working visit to Spain, met with the Minister of Agriculture, Luis Planas; visited the Spanish Congress and was honored by Universidad de Córdoba

In his meeting with Planas, Otero reflected on the close collaboration with Spain and characterized the Institute’s technical cooperation as systemic, efficient and collaborative, providing benefits to more than ten million farmers and actively undertaking 358 projects to enhance food security and rural development.

Tiempo de lectura: 3mins

San José, Costa Rica

September 10, 2025

Erick Geovany Ac Tot, a cocoa entrepreneur who promotes high-quality cocoa and the preservation of ancestral trees in Guatemala, is named an IICA Leader of Rurality 

Erick Geovany Ac Tot—a prominent Guatemalan cocoa entrepreneur who has been assisting small farmer organizations, promoting high-quality cocoa production and preserving heirloom trees for years, in addition to being a cocoa taster—has been named a Leader of Rurality of the Americas by the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA). 

Tiempo de lectura: 3mins