San Jose, 16 October 2025 (IICA) – The Director General of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), Manuel Otero, welcomed the World Bank’s decision to double its investments in the agriculture sector with the aim of strengthening this activity’s role in driving economic development and job creation.
The international financial agency plans to increase its current investment of USD 4.5 billion to USD 9 billion per year by 2030, with special emphasis on small-scale farmers, who produce 80 percent of food consumed worldwide.
This was revealed by World Bank President Ajay Banga when announcing a project entitled Mission AgriConnect, which seeks to improve access to funding, technology, and equipment for hundreds of millions of farmers in more than 20 countries.
It was announced that Latin America and the Caribbean will be among the regions that will benefit from the project, and that the goal will be to engage in joint work with other international agencies in a context characterized by declining official aid budgets and growing pressure on multilateral lenders to attract private investment.
“This is excellent news. The World Bank’s announcement clearly demonstrates the importance and soundness of IICA’s premises and lines of action, because small-scale farmers are key players in the sector, accounting for a considerable percentage of food that people put on their tables every day and contributing to rural retention”, said Otero.
“The inclusion of Latin America and the Caribbean among the beneficiary regions”, he added, “recognizes that our continent is a guarantor of global food security, because it is responsible for one out of every four tons of food produced in the world and one out of every three tons imported”.
Otero stated that IICA stands ready to assist the World Bank in helping small-scale farmers to increase their productivity, scale up and connect to value chains that can increase their income. To that end, IICA will tap into its broad experience in the region, where it works together with various strategic partners from the public and private sectors.
He also welcomed the fact that the World Bank’s announcement was made ahead of the 2025 Conference of Ministers of Agriculture of the Americas, which will take place from November 3 to 5 in Brasilia, and during which the Inter-American Board of Agriculture (IABA), IICA’s highest governing body, will meet.
According to the announcement, the Mission AgriConnect project will allow for modernizing family farming, based on the fact that the global population is expected to reach almost 10 billion people by 2050, which will require increasing food production.
At the same time, according to World Bank figures, 1.2 billion young people will enter the labor market in the next decade, which will require creating conditions to make agriculture more commercially viable, creating jobs, reducing poverty and improving food security in the process.
More information:
Institutional Communication Division.
comunicacion.institucional@iica.int
