BioFinCas

BioFinCas - Alliance Bioversity International - CIAT

Logo BIOFINCAS COLORBioFinCas is an international cooperation project promoting the large-scale transformation toward biodiversity-friendly, climate-resilient agriculture in cocoa, coffee, and banana production across Mexico, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. The Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT leads the research on biodiversity-friendly practices, providing the scientific evidence base that underpins the project's risk finance solutions and policy recommendations.

Project Name (full): Biodiversity Finance in Agricultural Cooperatives

Start and end year: 2023 - 2031

Region and Countries: Latin America: Mexico, Guatemala, Dominican Republic

Funder: IKI

Partners: OroVerde – Tropical Forest Foundation (Germany), Johann Heinrich von Thünen Institute – Germany, United Nations University, Institute for Environment and Human Security (UNU-EHS), Fundación Capital (FK), Centro para la Educación y Acción Ecológica, Naturaleza (CEDAE) – Dominican Republic,  Fundación Defensores de la Naturaleza (FDN) – Guatemala, Pronatura sur – Mexico, Nuup

Brief description

BioFinCas is working to accelerate the large-scale adoption of biodiversity- and climate-friendly practices in cocoa, coffee, and banana production across Mexico, Guatemala, and the Dominican Republic. We work with local institutions and smallholder farmers organized in agricultural umbrella organizations, who face mounting pressure from international markets, climate change, limited access to finance, and biodiversity loss, while value chains increasingly demand sustainable sourcing under frameworks like the EU Deforestation Regulation. The consortium addresses these challenges holistically.The Alliance, Thünen, and UNU build the evidence base on how alternative agricultural practices affect biodiversity, farm profitability, and climate resilience.

Together with the rest of the consortium, the project strengthens farmer capacity through training in biodiversity-friendly practices and financial literacy, pilots risk finance and insurance solutions tailored to small- and medium-holder agriculture, and promotes shared responsibility across value chains—from producers to international traders and retailers. What makes BioFinCas unique is the breadth of its consortium: nine organizations spanning research institutes, environmental NGOs, financial-inclusion specialists, climate risk experts, and trade policy advocates. Coordinating this diversity across three crops, three countries, and multiple value chains is itself a core challenge, weaving biodiversity science, financial innovation, and policy advocacy into one coherent strategy for systemic change.

Key activities

BioFinCas organizes its work around four interconnected outputs, each combining research, capacity-building, and field implementation.

  • On and off the ground, the consortium combines meta-analytic data exploration with field surveys in cocoa, coffee, and banana systems to measure how biodiversity-friendly practices affect biodiversity, productivity, and farm income, building a robust impact-assessment protocol that umbrella organizations can use to monitor their own progress.
  • Based on these findings, partners design and deliver training modules—covering sustainable production techniques, financial literacy, and risk management—reaching umbrella organizations and their member farmers across all three countries.
  • In parallel, the project develops and pilots risk finance and insurance products tailored to small- and medium-holder agriculture, testing digital financial programs with umbrella organizations before scaling them across countries.
  • On the policy side, the FABLE model is being mobilized to identify sustainable development pathways, analyze international trade frameworks such as the EU Deforestation Regulation, and translate findings into concrete policy recommendations shared with national governments and international platforms. Throughout, the consortium runs communication campaigns in Linkedin, participates in international forums (CBD, Global Coffee Platform, etc.), and convenes dialogues among producers, traders, and retailers to advance shared responsibility along value chains.

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