To reduce the risk of food and energy shortages and help maintain stable prices for emerging market buyers, IFC launched the Critical Commodities Finance Program (CCFP) to channel funds to support the global trade of commodities. Through this innovative partnership between IFC and private sector banks, the CCFP program maintains and expands credit for traders and intermediaries that move food and agricultural products in and out of low-income countries.
By supporting commodity-backed finance and outreach in partnerships with banks, the CCFP promotes commodities as an asset class and encourages local and regional banks to participate in funding critical economic sectors, which ultimately helps increase access to finance and develop local markets.
Thirty-eight of the poorest (IDA) countries rely on agriculture to provide over half the total jobs available in their economies. Estimates indicate that food production will need to grow by 70 percent to meet the needs of a growing global population by 2050.
To generate employment opportunities and help ensure food security in emerging markets, the CCFP enables the continued trade of crops, as well as the energy imports needed to enhance labor productivity, maintain economic growth, and sustain poverty reduction.
Program Structure
Leveraging IFC’s trade finance experience, in particular the structure and platform of its award-winning Global Trade Liquidity Program, the CCFP shares risk with global and regional banks as they expand their emerging market commodities trade portfolios. CCFP finances the exports and imports of agricultural commodities and inputs globally, and imports of energy into the world’s poorest countries.
IFC contributes its own funds and mobilizes additional funded and unfunded partners to channel liquidity and guarantees to emerging market banks and real sector companies, including input providers, producers, aggregators, and traders.
Results
To date, CCFP has supported over $23.5 billion in global trade, of which more than $10 billion of trade has been in IDA countries (including sub-Saharan Africa), all of which is directly linked to the movement of agricultural or energy goods across emerging market borders. CCFP has supported about 200 firms in 45 emerging market countries including 27 IDA countries, 17 Sub-Saharan African countries, and 7 fragile and conflict-affected countries (FCS).