Grow Asia is a multi-stakeholder partnership platform catalyzed by the World Economic Forum in partnership with the ASEAN Secretariat. It enables collaboration between governments, companies, civil society, farmers and others to develop value chain initiatives on priority crops. Locally-led, Grow Asia supports scalable, market-based solutions for sustainable, inclusive agriculture development with a focus on smallholder farmers and environmental sustainability.
The Vision
The New Vision for Agriculture, defined by World Economic Forum partners in 2009, holds that to meet the world’s needs sustainably agriculture must simultaneously deliver food security, environmental sustainability and economic opportunity. The Vision sets a goal of 20% improvement in each area per decade until 2050. Achieving those goals requires a transformation of the agriculture sector, leveraging market-based approaches through a coordinated effort by all stakeholders, including farmers, government, civil society and the private sector.
The key success factors of agriculture-sector transformation at the national level include setting the right direction through effective leadership, strategy and investment models, and scaling the transformation through finance, infrastructure, institutions and monitoring.
Partnerships
The World Economic Forum’s New Vision for Agriculture initiative engages over 350 organizations in its work to strengthen collaboration among relevant stakeholders. At a global level, it has partnered with the G7 and G20, facilitating informal leadership dialogue and collaboration. At the regional and country level, it has catalysed multistakeholder partnerships in 16 countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America, including two regional partnerships called Grow Africa and Grow Asia. Together, these efforts have mobilized over US $10 billion in investment commitments, of which US$1.2 billion has been implemented, reaching over 3.6 million smallholder farmers.
The World Economic Forum’s New Vision for Agriculture initiative supports national and regional partnership platforms engaging 16 countries across Africa, Asia and Latin America. These partnerships are: