agricultural developmentAGRICULTURAL DEVELOPMENT

It is estimated that 75% of the world’s poor still live in rural areas, and as such, many economies still rely heavily on agriculture. CHF International works to provide agricultural assistance both on the small and the large scales.

In rural communities that depend primarily on farming, CHF International works with local experts to find ways of increasing productivity, such as improving irrigation and soil fertility, identifying new crops, or providing livestock assets. For countries with more developed agricultural industries, such as Lebanon, we help farmers to add value to their products and reach greater markets.

In many of the low-income communities where CHF works, families subsist on small-scale farming that provides food for personal consumption but rarely ensures sufficient income when they sell their products at market.  These efforts are rarely linked along value chains that foster economic growth or mobilize the collective economic power which low-income groups can harness when working together in cooperatives, business associations or as non-governmental organizations.

Our efforts to rejuvenate agricultural outputs and strengthen market linkages are as locally appropriate a means to foster economic development in countries such as Bolivia and Honduras, as providing management training for small and medium-sized enterprises might be in another more developed economy, such as Romania. Moreover, by linking agricultural growth and skills-building in resource constrained settings such as Ethiopia, we are helping to lessen the detrimental impacts of drought and food insecurity.
 
Our USAID-funded CEDARS program in Lebanon is an excellent example of how environmental management and sector strengthening is fostering macro-level growth.  In addition to benefiting 18,000 people and creating 2,795 jobs, CEDARS generated more than US$29 million from private and leveraged international donor investment in light agro-industry creation, expansion and relocation.