Dec 19 2011 --- Member States of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), meeting in Rome for Consultations on the Ninth Replenishment of the Fund’s resources (IFAD9), announced a target of US$1.5 billion in new contributions to finance agriculture and rural development projects across the developing world. This represents a 25 per cent increase over IFAD’s Eighth Replenishment.

Every three years, the resources IFAD provides as loans and grants to developing countries are replenished by Member States. The Fund leverages member contributions to mobilize much higher amounts of funds through project co-financing with national governments, international donors and the private sector. IFAD’s work fills an important niche, with almost 2 billion rural people depending for their livelihoods on the 500 million smallholder farms in developing countries.

The injection of new funds from Member States is a confirmation of IFAD’s vital role in international development architecture as an effective organization delivering results in the area of food and income security, especially for the poorest people. Forty to fifty per cent of these resources will be channelled to Sub-Saharan Africa for development projects.

Member States recognized IFAD as a highly efficient organization among international financial institutions and United Nations (UN) agencies. They commended its work to deliver value for money and made unprecedented efforts to overcome the effects of widespread budgetary difficulties to ensure that the Fund has sufficient resources to do its job for poor rural people worldwide.

“This significant support from IFAD’s Member States, especially during these challenging global economic times, demonstrates extraordinary resolve and political will to give agriculture a major boost and help the world’s small farmers find their way out of poverty,” said IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze.

Echoing the spirit of global development partnership emerging from the Fourth High Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, Republic of Korea, earlier this month, the replenishment cements IFAD’s unique status. Since its establishment, IFAD has been an example of global development partnership, with members from the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), other developing countries and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) playing an active role in the Fund’s governance. For IFAD9, all of these partners contributed to the upward trend of pledges.

A number of developing countries that had not participated in previous replenishments announced their contributions, including some from the UN list of “least developed countries”. The IFAD9 replenishment is the highest percentage increase of contributions of any international financial institution in the current round of replenishments.

Pledges during the two-day Consultation point to an upward trend.

Some countries pledged far more than the amounts contributed to IFAD to earlier replenishments. The Report and the Resolution of the Consultation will be submitted to the Governing Council for adoption in February 2012.

In addition to the new funds, Member States mandated IFAD to find new sources of finance that effectively share the development burden more broadly, including raising investment from non-members and others.