At the invitation of Brazil’s H.E. Ambassador Carla Barroso Carneiro and the EU’s H.E. Ambassador Martin Selmayr, NOW Partners Foundation was honored to join the launch of the UN FAO’s Group of Friends on Bioeconomy for Sustainable Food and Agriculture.

NOW’s Laura Santucci presented NOW’s collaboration with the Ministry of Agrarian Development (MDA) to scale socio-bioeconomy initiatives globally. These initiatives focus on three key areas: scaling successful, regenerative agricultural innovations like SAF Dende agroforestry method in the Amazon, shown to be 30-40% more productive than conventional farming; co-creating guarantee funds to unlock over $1 billion in low-interest financing for family farmers; and internationally expanding the widely successful, science-based APCNF natural farming initiative, with the goal of creating more financially sound and sustainable futures for hundreds of millions of farmers worldwide.

Line up of speakers:
Ambassador Martin Selmayr (EU)
Ambassador Carla Barroso Carneiro (Brazil)
Marina Silva, Minister of the Environment (Brazil)
Carina Pimenta, National Secretary of Bioeconomy (Brazil)
Kaveh Zahedi, FAO Office of Climate Change, Biodiversity and Environment,
Laura Santucci, Managing Partner, NOW Partners Foundation (Italy)
Patrick Child, Deputy Director General of Environment (EU)
Ambassador Carla Barroso Carneiro (Brazil)

Building on FAO’s work on bioeconomy and progress made in other international fora, the Group of Friends will serve as a forum for discussion and coordination among members on how to best integrate bioeconomy approaches in the transformation towards resilient, sustainable, and resource-efficient agrifood systems.

Learn more about NOW’s work to scale and finance regenerative models of agriculture and land use globally: www.naturalfarming.global