Esteemed colleagues,
Ladies and gentlemen,

Good morning and welcome to IFAD.  Thank you all for coming, and particularly those of you who have travelled from as far as China, India, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia to be here.

Looking around, it is a pleasure to see such a diverse and qualified group of experts. We have representatives from development agencies, IFIs, banks and think tanks; from government, sovereign wealth funds, and NGOs. The expertise in this room ranges from resource mobilization, to international economic security, to legal practice and impact investing. In short, we are very pleased to have mobilized you – all very valuable resources – for these two days!

This roundtable discussion is an opportunity for us to share experiences and insights on financing for development and to learn from each other.

This discussion is just one step that we are taking to honour a Resolution issued by our Governing Council earlier this year, asking that IFAD’s management “make every effort to explore the scope for increasing financing from alternative sources and to submit any resulting proposals to the Executive Board for approval.”

My longer-term hope is that these technical discussions will help us to identify promising avenues for formulating an enhanced resource mobilization strategy for IFAD, one that will eventually be brought to the attention of our Executive Board for its consideration.

Your participation in this roundtable will be key in helping to shape IFAD’s thinking on the way we mobilize resources, with the ultimate goal of improving our impact on poverty reduction and rural development. And for this I want to thank you.

About IFAD

Before moving into our technical discussion, let me take a few minutes to introduce IFAD.

The International Fund for Agricultural Development, commonly known as IFAD, is one of the three United Nations agencies based in Rome. We work closely with our sister agencies:  the Food and Agriculture Organization and the World Food Programme.

But like all siblings, we have our own, distinct, personality. IFAD is distinct because in addition to being a UN agency we are also an international financial institution, one that is exclusively focused on agriculture and rural development.

IFAD provides low-interest loans and grants to its developing Member States to finance projects that are designed to empower poor rural people to grow and sell more food, increase their incomes and determine the direction of their own lives.

Often, we work as a facilitator, helping to orchestrate a broad response to the key issues facing smallholders and poor rural people, and mobilizing co-financing for rural development programmes.

To date, we have mobilized around US$21 billion in cofinancing and funding from domestic sources, in addition to the more than $13 billion IFAD has contributed.

As you are well aware, this is not an easy economic climate in which to mobilize funding. Despite the challenges involved, we at IFAD know that responding to these difficult economic conditions by cutting back on investments in agriculture and development would be a mistake. One that would result in greater world food insecurity and slower economic growth. We are therefore doing our utmost to encourage more capital flows into this sector.

The importance of channelling more financing into agriculture was clearly recognized at the G8 meeting in L’Aquila, when leaders pledged more than US$20 billion for food security, and again last month at Camp David when Members renewed their commitments to keep food security high on the global agenda with the creation of the New Alliance to Increase Food Security and Nutrition.

We were heartened to see that smallholder farmers were named in the latest G8 declaration as important private sector partners. Smallholders, and farmers in general, are the biggest investors in agriculture in developing countries.  They invest not only their own money but also their time and labour.

In an era when demand for food is growing exponentially, there is an unprecedented potential for agriculture to be the centre of new and vibrant markets.

The world’s 500 million smallholder and family farms are well positioned to be key suppliers of today’s growing urban markets, and to continue supplying rural markets. Today, many of these smallholders are poor. But with the right policy support and investments, they can supply these markets on better terms and with greater capacity, and in the process improve their own incomes and food security.

At IFAD, we work to eliminate the poverty that prevails in the rural areas of developing countries by making rural economies more productive and fruitful for the women and men who live there.

In February 2012, IFAD’s Governing Council approved a target for the ninth replenishment of IFAD’s resources of US$1.5 billion.  Despite the harsh financial environment adversely impacting many of our members this was, nevertheless, a 25% increase in replenishment over IFAD 8 which is unquestionably a testament to our Member States’ continuing support of IFAD.

This $1.5 billion will allow us to have a target Programme of Loans and Grants of $2.95 billion, which covers the period of 2013 to 2015, and this target was also approved by the Governing Council.

Despite this success, work done by our Programme Management Department indicates that IFAD could absorb and administer a Programme of Loans and Grants of up to $4.5 billion, or possibly higher, a figure which would allow IFAD to lift approximately 80 million people out of poverty.

In other words, the demand for IFAD’s services is large and growing. We therefore seek additional financing to meet this rising demand, maximize benefits for poor people, and fulfil our institutional mission.

As a part of the ninth replenishment, the Governing Council also gave IFAD a mandate to explore alternative financing possibilities in order to increase our impact on the rural poor still more. It is to help us explore these financing possibilities that we turn to you today, to consider together innovative ways of increasing the resources that IFAD mobilizes and administers.

Results that Count
In recent years there has been growing recognition of IFAD’s approach to development which acknowledges that farming at any scale is a business.

Even subsistence farmers focused on survival have a business model. Their bottom line is food in their stomachs. They need to increase their productivity so that they can make the leap out of subsistence, with enough for their table and a surplus to bring to market.

Businesses need clear linkages along the value chain, from production to processing, marketing and, ultimately, to consumption.

At IFAD, we know there is no magic bullet, no secret formula that will eliminate poverty and hunger overnight. But there are solutions that, when properly tested, scaled up and tailored to the realities of a specific region, or even a specific village, can transform lives.

We also believe it is the results that count. Results that are sustainable -- economically, environmentally and socially.  The consistency and effectiveness of our results is borne out by reviews and assessments by third parties, including the Australian, British and Swedish governments, the Brookings Institution, the OECD/DAC, and the Multilateral Organisation Performance Assessment Network [MOPAN].

We believe that the best way to make sure that rural development is effective and sustainable is to take a bottom-up approach, listening to and working with the poor rural people we are trying to help – ensuring that they are real and active partners in their own development

During my travels around the world, visiting IFAD-supported programmes and projects, I have met countless people whose lives have been transformed by market-oriented agriculture.

I have been consistently amazed and impressed by the desire and the ability of people to transform their own lives when they are empowered by targeted and tailored investments.

Ladies and gentlemen,

It has long been accepted that agriculture and rural development are vital for ensuring long term food security. Increasingly, it is also understood that they are also pathways to wealth creation and economic growth.
This understanding creates many new avenues for partnership, and for mobilizing and channelling resources, even when these resources are limited.

It is these avenues that we look forward to exploring with you over the next two days. And I hope you will provide us with your insights on the way forward.

Thank you.

Rome, 12 June 2012