On June 3, The International Finance Corporation (IFC), a member of the World Bank Group, in partnership with the Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic and in cooperation with the Ukrainian Agribusiness Club Association, held a fireside chat in Amsterdam titled "Empowering Transformation: Scaling Regenerative Food Systems to Strengthen Supply Chain Resilience" as part of the "Transform Food & Agriculture Europe 2025" forum by Reuters Events.

During the fireside chat, Dorothy Shaver, Global Food Sustainability Director, Unilever, and Yekaterina Foster, Operations Officer, International Finance Corporation (IFC), discussed in detail how regenerative food systems can secure supply chains, reduce risks, and ensure long-term business viability. The speakers focused on the importance of taking a systemic approach to bolstering regenerative practices, focusing on the importance of balancing the risks and benefits of such interventions, providing implementation support, and ensuring the commercial viability of standards and practices.

Yekaterina Foster noted that the convergent crises of weather-related changes, biodiversity loss, soil degradation, and food insecurity pose enormous risks to IFC’s clients across the value chain. This is why IFC supports agribusiness companies from ‘farm to fork’ with advisory and financial services, with a focus to spreading global knowledge and best practices to implement and scale regenerative agricultural practices. This flexibility allows IFC to interact with clients at various stages of development – from farmers and raw material suppliers to processors and equipment manufacturers.

Dorothy Shaver explained that Unilever actively invests in adopting restorative agricultural practices, having 23 programs covering approximately 130,000 hectares, with an ambition to reach 1 million hectares by 2030. Positive results are already being observed, including a significant reduction in methane emissions in a rice cultivation project in the USA, an increase in pollinators in tomato fields in Spain, and others. Unilever has allocated around one billion euros, which it plans to spend on these projects by 2030, with approximately 670 million already reserved. These funds are invested in the company's own projects as well as in other enterprises, such as organic fertilizer producers, technological, and innovative solutions.

In turn, Yekaterina Foster mentioned that farmers should be at the center of implementing regenerative approaches: "Farmers are the ones who will implement this system, especially in developing countries. They face numerous obstacles – access to finance, lack of implementation support, burdensome reporting and measurement standards, and potential yield reduction. IFC took all of this into account when developing its new client-driven regenerative agriculture framework, which builds on three main pillars of building resilience of farmers' livelihoods, restoring natural resources and cycles, and reducing net greenhouse gas emissions on farms."

Additionally, Dorothy Shaver spoke to the importance of farmer-to-farmer communication: "For instance, in the tomato fields of Spain, the implementation of drip irrigation allowed one farm to save its harvest during the 2022 drought, which became an incentive for the entire community to adopt cover crops, drip irrigation, and organic fertilizers the following year. They saw the results firsthand – increased biodiversity (birds and bees) and significantly higher yields. Another important component of success is individual projects, during which farmers can experiment before they scale up, thereby minimizing their risks. And it is also necessary to change narratives, speak the same language as farmers, reward positive results, and incentivize the continuation of these practices."

"To scale regenerative agriculture, the entire supply chain needs to be involved. Both benefits and risks must be systematized and distributed among all participants. It's crucial to demonstrate the real, not just perceived, return on investment for farmers and other agribusiness participants. This requires long-term capital, which IFC and other financial institutions can provide. But at the same time, we need to define risks and potential benefits much more precisely, because due to excessive 'information noise,' it is sometimes extremely difficult to achieve this," summarized Yekaterina Foster.

The discussion highlighted the critical need to expand regenerative agriculture from niche practices to a broad segment of farmers. This will require the efforts of all participants in the supply chains: from financial organizations and government officials to food producers, retail chains, and even chefs, who must create demand.

IFC, together with the Ministry of Finance of the Czech Republic and UCAB, sincerely thanks the forum organizers, speakers, and participants of the discussion for the valuable insights and analytical discussion during the fireside chat. Only by building shared experience in developing regenerative food systems and making efforts to promote regenerative practices can we take a step closer to ensuring global food security and sustainable development.