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
