Press Releases
14 November, 2024 - COP29 Azerbaijan
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Baku, Azerbaijan, 14 November, 2024 Today at the COP29 Global Conference on Climate, GreenEarth Agro, a data-driven regenerative agriculture company, announced its new Growing Prosperity™ web and mobile app platform, designed to, for the first time, broadly empower international capital investments in regenerative agriculture in the Global South where previously, such investments were often impossible. The announcement was made as part of a UNFCCC COP29 panel discussion entitled,”No Food, No Future: Why Regenerative Agriculture Is Non-Negotiable,” sponsored by Global Green Environmental Network GLOGEN), a Ghanaian NGO.
According to the World Bank publication "Recipe for a Livable Planet" (7 May, 2024), One third of global GHG emissions come from agribusiness but only 4.3% of total climate finance directed toward agriculture, forestry, and land-use sectors, with less than 1% of climate investments dedicated to reducing emissions within the agriculture sector. According to the authors, “The world has avoided confronting agrifood system emissions for as long as it could because of the scope and complexity of the task."
As a profitable venture, agricultural projects could hope to attract private capital to fill this gap. However, as discussed by the panel two problems limit this. First, many capital investors seek the highest and fastest return on investment, which can be viewed, rightly or wrongly, as incompatible with regenerative practices. Second, and more definitive, the problems with clarity of legal land tenancy issues entirely preclude investment by professional money managers who are unable to provide proper due diligence on agricultural investments occurring on land not recorded on a modern, computerized database – as less than 20% of lands in Africa are.
The Growing Prosperity platform solves this previously intractable problem by creating a framework for migrating records for farmland from hereditary or tribal land records to modern, computerized cadastral systems. In a pilot program in Ghana, working with various governmental agencies, GreenEarth Agro has perfected a systematic process for making land investible. GreenEarth Agro’s data-driven regenerative farming operation in Ghana’s Central District has brought several tranches of land onto the modern system in a reproducible manner that it can apply to other jurisdictions across Africa and the Global South with only minor adjustments required for most legal jurisdictions.
Growing Prosperity also greatly improves investor transparency in the projects on its platform through the timely collection of multiple data streams from each project. This data is designed to be inexpensive for farmers to collect and is immutably recorded on Africa’s Ayetu data and finance network (ayetu.net). With this rich data, Growing Prosperity will be able to provide robust data dashboards for each project and investor, and will gamify the investment experience in a manner it refers to as “Farmville with Real Food,” in reference to the popular Zynga game.
“For too long, feeding people and addressing climate have been treated as separate problems, when the fact is, you simply cannot decarbonize a hungry world,” said GreenEarth Agro CEO, Rushank Bardolia, a panelist. “Arable land that cannot be farmed regeneratively, will very likely be exploited through slash-and-burn practices. This is why bringing in climate- and profit-minded investors is crucial.”
Panel moderator Douglas Horn, CTO of GreenEarth Agro, remarked, “Technological advancements in monitoring, AI, and distributed finance make this the time to finally unravel this Gordian knot of sustainable agriculture investment. And we intend to make it a fun experience for investors who can use our discovery engine to find farms to invest in, and see both their returns and impact grow in highly visual, easy to follow, real-time charts.”
The first public release of the Growing Prosperity platform is scheduled for the end of Q1 2025. More information, including links to the proof-of-concept data transparency site, is available at https://growingprosperity.io.
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About GreenEarth Agro
GreenEarth Agro is an innovative agricultural organization in Ghana seeking to increase the production of nutritious food for regional consumption through data-driven regenerative farming practices. GEA seeks to balance food production for local consumption to address food security goals and export products to improve operational stability and attract the capital investment from outside Africa necessary to ensure both ecological and economical sustainability. In six years of operation, GEA has cracked the code for finally enabling international capital markets to invest in regenerative agriculture in developing economies previously constrained by unclear land tenancy verification and low investor transparency. The solutions GEA has innovated are embodied in the Growing Prosperity™ investment platform.
For more information, visit gearthagro.com
About Global Green Environmental Network (GLOGEN)
Global Green Environmental Network (GLOGEN) is a non-governmental organization made up of environmental professionals from tertiary schools and certified institutions in Ghana that have researched biodiversity conservation and sustainable management in Ghana, its sub-region and other communities or areas where the impact has been felt with global bearing and consequences.
Founded and led by Kweku Amankwah, the organization’s team works in other major environmental fields of global prominence like desertification and drought thematic areas, water conservation and sustainable management, and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
For more information, visit globalgreennetwork.org
