IFC - International Finance Corporation

Published purpose

The Facility for Resilient Food Systems aims to enhance people’s food security, food system resilience and well-being through improved food availability and food affordability in developing countries. The Facility leverages Canada’s concessional finance alongside the International Finance Corporation (IFC) to mobilize private capital and accelerate the response to the global food security crisis. The Facility rapidly addresses critical financing needs and disruptions to agricultural production and agri-food supply chains. It makes strategic investments in private sector-led solutions to build more diversified, productive and resilient local food systems in the long term. The Facility also provides advisory and technical services to financial intermediaries, agribusinesses and farmers along the food value chain to improve their long-term financial sustainability, gender responsiveness and resilience to climate risks so they can continue to deliver much needed food to vulnerable communities. In doing so, the Facility contributes to increasing the resilience of food systems to future shocks in developing countries and reducing the number of people at risk from food insecurity, including women and the most vulnerable. Projects supported by the Facility might include but are not limited to: (i) working capital and longer-term financing to resume food production in areas affected by conflict; (ii) financing to help diversify production to new origins; (iii) investments in warehousing or storage to reduce vulnerabilities to global supply chain disruptions; and (iv) support to supply lower carbon fertilizers and crop inputs. Project activities include: (1) supporting financial intermediaries and other clients to provide financial products to agribusiness and other agri-value chain actors; (2) providing financial and technical support to agribusiness firms and agri-food value chain actors to support improvement in local production; and (3) providing support and capacity building to agribusiness firms to incentivize more climate-sustainable and gender-responsive business practices.