The Executive President of CAF—The Development Bank of Latin America—met with IICA Director General, Manuel Otero.
San Jose, 20 June 2022 (IICA) – Sergio Díaz-Granados, Executive President of CAF—The Development Bank of Latin America—indicated that the multilateral organization would aim to strengthen collaboration with the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA), particularly in light of its decision to focus part of its actions on green financing.
In a recent discussion with Manuel Otero, the Director General of IICA, Díaz-Granados recalled that CAF, which was established solely as an Andean development bank, later evolved into a hemispheric-wide bank and one of the region’s most important public goods facilitating financial integration in Latin America.
The officials were both attending the meeting of Heads of State and Government at the Summit of the Americas, which took place in the U.S. city of Los Angeles.
The CAF Executive President reported that, “In the last 25 years, CAF has increased its presence and now includes 20 shareholder countries; and in the last 54 years, the bank has provided more than 200 billion dollars in financing”.
Díaz-Granados also explained that, “Recently, our directors unanimously approved a capital increase of 7 billion dollars to enable the bank to increase its capacity to provide loans to Latin America, to governments, to cities, to local governments and to the private sector”.
Thus, he indicated that the entity plans to “double its size over the next eight years, enabling it to provide even more financing to governments, initiatives and projects of all kinds”.
Within this framework, the Board of Directors of CAF, “have asked us to focus our actions on green financing, meaning that 40% of our financing between now and 2026, that is almost
25 million dollars, will go to green financing”, said Díaz-Granados, who is a former Minister of Trade and Industry of Colombia”.
Green financing for food security and sustainability
The CAF Executive President also stated that, “When we use the term green financing, we are talking about a series of initiatives that include sustainable agriculture. Herein lies the importance of the CAF-IICA collaboration, given IICA’s track record, presence and capacity in the Americas, particularly in Latin America and the Caribbean”.
“Thus, we wish to build on this collaboration between CAF and IICA and to join hands to tackle the challenges facing agriculture in Latin America – joining forces to address food security, access to food, the agriculture sector’s preparation to meet climate change, climate change mitigation and, of course, climate change adaptation. This will be one of the areas of focus of the work with IICA and I would like to thank Manuel Otero and his team for the support they have given to bring about closer engagement between the two institutions.”
More information:
Institutional Communication Division
comunicacion.institucional@iica.int
