Agriterra

About Us

Agriterra is a development agency founded and
steered by the farmers’ organisations and agricultural cooperatives in the
Netherlands. Its mandate is to strengthen producers’ organisations worldwide.
Among other activities it supports co-operative farmer-led economic development
in developing countries. Agriterra mainly acts as a facilitating agency and
provides advisory and broker services to farmer-led business initiatives to
enable them to:

• Develop sound and bankable business plans for
  starting-up new agribusiness ventures and/or expanding existing ones
• Improve their financial management capacity
• Have access to capital.
• Rely on technical support and backstopping.
• Overall improve the business activities of
  the cooperative and its members.
• Have better ownership by members and
  governance in the organisation.

For farmer-led business initiatives,
Agriterra specifically supports business development services in the
pre-investment phase such as feasibility studies, market surveys, business
planning and capacity building components. In addition Agriterra provides:

• Brokerage services to link farmer-led
  business development initiatives with investors, banks and other primary and supportive
  stakeholders in the value chain. 
• Advisory services often employing AgriPool
  advisors: experts stemming from co-operative and private agribusiness companies
  from the Netherlands and beyond with a specific thematic or sector expertise.

Direct support to agribusiness

The
Agribusiness team supports farmers’ organisations in increasing their market
power. They often lack solid business plans and entrepreneurial skills.
Agriterra offers services to these companies in order to improve this.
Connections between cooperatives and other kinds of agribusinesses and the
financial sector are made.

At
Agriterra, the term ‘agribusiness’ means a company where the involved farmers
have control either directly or indirectly. This control comes either because
it is a membership organisation with farmers as members or because agricultural
organisations hold the shares and participations.

Agribusinesses – usually cooperatives – lend their services to primary
agriculture. They become clients of our team because they need knowledge,
skills, contacts and/or other capacities to plan and realize their growth
ambitions. A strong, competitive market position is therefore the aim to which the
team of business advisors makes its contribution.

This contribution mainly consists of advice and technical aid in the field of
entrepreneurship, business planning, financial management and day-to-day
management. This way, companies become bankable: ripe for investment. A further
step is that business advisors with Agriterra, working in the region, approach
investors and banks in order to ensure the success of the investment plans.