Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc.; Multilateral Investment Fund; Skoll Foundation and Root Capital Join Forces to Fight the Leaf Rust Epidemic Devastating Latin American Coffee
$7 Million Public-Private Partnership Models Holistic Approach to Ensure Agricultural Supply Chain Stability in Face of Increasing Climate Risk
BURLINGTON, VT, November 7, 2013 /3BL Media/ - Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (GMCR), the Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF) of the InterAmerican Development Bank and Skoll Foundation announce today support for the non-profit agricultural lender Root Capital’s Coffee Farmer Resilience Initiative. The initiative is a collaborative venture designed to stabilize supply chains by investing in coffee farmers at the base of the value chain, who are on the front lines of battling the leaf rust epidemic in Latin America.
“We depend on a long-term supply of high-quality beans for our business,” said Lindsey Bolger, Vice President of Coffee Sourcing Excellence for GMCR. “This investment will provide coffee farming families with the tools and capacity they need to more successfully confront threats to their coffee and their livelihoods, through greater long-term resilience at the cooperative and household level.”
The announcement was made before hundreds of coffee industry professionals at Let’s Talk Roya, a solutions-oriented conference hosted by Sustainable Harvest, a private sector partner helping to implement the initiative.
The largest-ever partnership between the organizations combines long-term lending to finance the replacement of diseased coffee trees affected by the fungal disease with short-term trade credit, financial management training, climate-smart agronomic assistance and household-level income diversification. The $7 million initiative will allow Root Capital to lend more than $10 million for resilience investments, and provide financial management training, to 50 agricultural enterprises representing 40,000 farmers, reaching approximately 200,000 family members in farming communities in Latin America.
Beyond the direct impact, the initiative aims to serve as a blueprint for holistic investments in farmer resilience that can be replicated and scaled by other private-public partnerships in agriculture. Seeded with funding from the Skoll Foundation, the initiative complements global efforts to build the market for smallholder agricultural finance in a manner that encourages environmental stewardship and resilience, in addition to sustainable rural livelihoods.
Coffee rust, called La Roya in Spanish, is a fungal disease that weakens and eventually kills coffee trees. The principal causes of the outbreak that is sweeping Central America and northern Peru today are a warmer, wetter climate; historic underinvestment in farms and aging coffee trees. According to the International Coffee Organization, the current epidemic of coffee leaf rust is the highest incidence in 40 years, with more than half of Central America’s coffee farms infected, and losses reaching $1 billion in the 2012-2013 harvest.
“Root Capital’s Coffee Farmer Resilience Initiative is a holistic approach that responds to the current crisis while investing in rural enterprises’ ability to maintain consumer supply in the face of growing shocks from climate change and volatile commodity markets,” says Willy Foote, Root Capital Founder & CEO. “The initiative is a blueprint for agricultural supply chain sustainability that creates shared value for farmers, buyers and consumers.”
Root Capital launched the Initiative with a $2 million loan to SOPPEXCCA, a 650-member coffee farmer cooperative based in Jinotega, Nicaragua. SOPPEXCCA will use the loan to renovate farms ravaged by the fungus, replacing dead coffee trees with new, high-quality, rust-resistant varietals.
Latin America is the world’s largest producer of coffee, producing 60 percent, according to the International Coffee Organization (ICO). The areas hardest hit by roya, Central America and Peru, produce roughly 20 percent of Latin America’s total volume.
In Central America alone, approximately 2 million of the 43 million inhabitants are directly employed by the coffee industry, according to the ICO, which estimates that more than 400,000 became jobless after the 2013-2013 harvest, due to La Roya.
“This public private partnership has big implications for agricultural sustainability,” says Claudio Cortellese, Head of the Access to Markets Unit of the MIF. "It will improve the well-being of hundreds of thousands of Latin American coffee farmers while serving as a model for long-term resilience that other agricultural value chains can reproduce, from quinoa to cacao. ”
"Like small businesses in the U.S., smallholder coffee farming is the economic engine for rural communities in Latin America," notes David Griswold, President and Founder of Sustainable Harvest Coffee Importers. "We're pleased to be working with Root Capital, IDB and GMCR to help increase farmers' resiliency to the effects of climate change, enabling them to continue to deliver the high quality coffee U.S. consumers and the rest of the world depend on."
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About Root Capital
Root Capital is a nonprofit agricultural lender that grows rural prosperity in poor, environmentally vulnerable places in Africa and Latin America by lending capital, delivering financial training, and strengthening market connections for small and growing agricultural businesses. Since 1999, Root Capital has disbursed more than $500 million in credit to over 450 businesses, improving livelihoods for 750,000 rural producer households. For more information, visit www.rootcapital.org
About Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (NASDAQ: GMCR)
As a leader in specialty coffee and coffee makers, Green Mountain Coffee Roasters, Inc. (GMCR) (NASDAQ: GMCR), is recognized for its award-winning coffees, innovative Keurig® brewing technology, and socially responsible business practices. GMCR supports local and global communities by investing in sustainably-grown coffee, and donating a portion of its profits to social and environmental projects. For more information, please visit www.gmcr.com; www.greenmountaincoffee.com, or www.keurig.com.
About the Multilateral Investment Fund
The Multilateral Investment Fund (MIF), a member of the Inter-American Development Bank Group, supports private sector-led development benefitting low-income populations and the poor - their businesses, their farms, and their households. The aim is to give them the tools to boost their incomes: access to markets and the skills to compete in those markets, access to finance, and access to basic services, including green technology. A core MIF mission is to act as a development laboratory - experimenting, pioneering, and taking risks in order to build and support successful micro and SME business models. It is the largest international technical assistance provider to the private sector in Latin America and the Caribbean. More information at www.fomin.org
About the Skoll Foundation
The Skoll Foundation was created by Jeff Skoll in 1999 to pursue his vision of a more peaceful, prosperous, and sustainable world. The mission of the Skoll Foundation is to drive large-scale change by investing in, connecting, and celebrating social entrepreneurs and the innovators who help them solve the world’s most pressing problems. Social entrepreneurs are society’s change agents—creators of innovations that disrupt the status quo and transform our world for the better. By identifying the people and programs already enacting positive change throughout the world, the Foundation empowers them to extend their reach, deepen their impact, and fundamentally improve society. http://www.skollfoundation.org/
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