The objective is to create a transformative financial system to support smallholder farmers as they restore soil health, safeguard vital forests and biodiversity, and provide more nutritious food to schools.
By the Numbers
- $0TrillionTrillion
annually are the hidden environmental, health, and social costs of global food systems
- 0
Brazilian Amazon acres will be restored through the Amana Project’s regenerative efforts
- 0StudentsStudents
are anticipated to receive more nutritious school meals through the project
Lighthouse Initiatives Show the Way
With backing from The Rockefeller Foundation, the Amana Project is partnering with farmers’ organizations in the Amazon state of Pará, Brazil, to regenerate 91,000 hectares (250,000 acres) of degraded land by intercropping existing palm oil plantations with agroforestry systems producing banana, cassava, cacao, pineapple, and other crops. The initiative seeks to provide regeneratively produced food items for 2,500 students in school meal programs in the area.
It’s known as a “lighthouse initiative,” meant to illuminate best practices for scaling up regenerative agriculture and activating the financing needed to spur the transition.
Marcelo Cwerner in a Quilombola community in 2024 in Oriximiná, Pará, coordinating a visit to copaíba and Brazil nut collector’s house. (Photo Courtesy of Marcelo Cwerner)
In contrast to fossil-fuel-dependent industrial agriculture, regenerative or agroecological food production strives for outcomes like increased soil health, better water quality and biodiversity, and improved farmer well-being.
The intent is to have 25-30 lighthouse initiatives underway globally by 2030, with additional projects in the pipeline.
The initiatives share common traits: they serve vulnerable populations, are collaborative and replicable, and carry the potential to catalyze large-scale adoption across key regions of the globe, including Asia, Africa, Brazil, and the U.S. Midwest.
They also deploy adaptive financing models to reduce the costs and risks of transition by blending different risk profiles of investors so credit can be given out at much lower rates than commercially available.
Farming, Financing, and the Future
The roadmap for the Amana Project was laid out in a Financing for Regenerative Agriculture report that inspired a Bellagio Center convening attended by Cwerner as well as representatives from The Rockefeller Foundation, off-taker businesses including Natura, producer groups, investment facility JGP and ITAUSA, Metabolic, and Transformational Investing in Food Systems (TIFS), an impact investing network focused on food systems.
For traditional and institutional lenders, conventional farming aligns with familiar lending models and can feel financially safer. However, the report notes that this perception overlooks the significant risks tied to traditional agriculture, especially where projections show steep declines in yields for key crops due to rising temperature extremes, drought, and shifting precipitation patterns.
Regenerative practices, which enhance food chain resiliency, are a safer bet long-term, the report says.
The hidden environmental, health, and social costs of global food systems equal at least $13 trillion each year. “Meanwhile, steady depletion of natural resources threatens the long-term productivity of food systems, with climate change further exacerbating supply chain volatility and endangering producer livelihoods,” notes the report.
Rex Raimond of TIFS presenting the Lighthouse concept during New York Climate Week 2024. (Photo Courtesy of Rex Raimond)
“Systems change doesn’t come from single organizations. It’s a team sport,” noted The Rockefeller Foundation’s Sara Farley, who leads the foundation’s regenerative work globally. “You have to have people coming together with different philosophies, backgrounds, and areas of expertise.”
In the field of regenerative agriculture transitions, this means investors, off-takers, and producers – the latter represented by Cwerner given his vast experience with smallholder farmers.
“Mounting evidence shows regenerative agriculture offers ecological, economic, social, and health benefits under most scenarios after a period of transition,” Farley said. “We’re gaining a bit of momentum, but it’s slow compared to the size of the challenge and the opportunity. Activating this change requires a holistic approach where farmers, financiers, business, government, and landscape stakeholders all take part in constructing the pathway forward.”
The report explores five different financial vehicles that can support operating expenses for farmers transitioning to regenerative practices, including no-chemicals and no-till farming, crop variety and managed grazing. The goal, as articulated by vast networks of producers, businesses, and funders like Regen10, is to transition to 50 percent regenerative and agroecology systems by 2040 and to ensure all food and agricultural systems are transitioning by 2050.
“The lighthouses are about showing the world what is possible,” said Rex Raimond, TIFS Director. “We want to send a message to the financial industry that systems change is scalable, and that regeneration is not confined to local farmers’ market.”
A Look at Palm Oil
- Palm oil, which comes from the palm tree, dominates the global vegetable oil market and is an efficient crop, producing more oil per land area than any other equivalent vegetable oil.
- It accounts for about 40 percent of the global market and is a crucial ingredient in a wide range of products, from food items like ice cream and baked goods to non-food products such as cosmetics, detergents, and biofuels.
- At the same time, as traditionally grown, it is very destructive to the environment, leading to extensive deforestation, polluting water sources, threatening biodiversity through monocropping and disruption of habitats, and contributing up to 4 percent of annual global greenhouse emissions.
- Growing palm oil through regenerative practices will improve the resilience of existing plantations especially if practices like agroforestry that promote increased biodiversity, soil health, and water quality are employed and if farmer well-being is prioritized.
- Though it is primarily cultivated in Indonesia and Malaysia, the Brazilian Amazon ranks 10th in palm oil production, mostly grown in the Tomé-açu region of Pará State, in northern Brazil along the lower Amazon River. About 39 percent of the state residents live in poverty. Food insecurity stands at about 20 percent.
Farmers and Students at the Heart of Transformative Change
Part of what makes the Amana Project and the other lighthouse initiatives ambitious is the determination to weave equity throughout the work, both in terms of improving school meals with nutritious locally grown food, and giving smallholder farmers an equal say in designing and implementing change, Raimond noted.
Marcelo Cwerner discusses the Amana Project during a Climate Week NYC event in 2024. (Photo Courtesy of Marcelo Cwerner)
“We want to create a more equitable food system that generates positive returns for all, including nature, producers, and consumers,” he said. “And at the same time, we need to keep investors at the table by showing that regeneration builds resilience in the face of growing instability.”
Brazilian financier Jose Pugas, another key figure who supports the project, traces his commitment to equity back to a defining moment in law school. When a pipeline spill dumped 340,000 gallons of oil into Brazil’s Guanabara Bay, crippling the fishing industry, his father — a union leader for fisherfolk — told him, “I don’t trust lawyers, but I trust you.”
Determined to act, Pugas began his sustainability journey through law and later pivoted to finance. Now a partner and head of sustainability at Brazilian asset manager JPG, he played a pivotal role in launching the Amana Project.
“The Amana Project represents everything I believe in,” he said. “It is large scale and inclusive. It flips the script on palm oil, which has previously promoted deforestation but is now being used to reforest areas. It creates income for local communities and a clear return for short-term and long-term investors.”
His father, he said, remains his inspiration. “He was fighting through politics and I’m fighting in the economic sector, but we both share the same hunger to make the world better.
Cwerner, the project’s farmer liaison, is also committed to a fairer world. At age 30, Cwerner was on the brink of becoming the youngest partner in KPMG, a global financing firm, and completing a multi-million-dollar deal on Wall Street. One evening, walking along Manhattan’s 5th Avenue, he saw homeless people sleeping outside a store selling luxury watches.
“That moment shook me,” he said. “I started questioning what I was really contributing to the world. I realized the most valuable thing isn’t money — it’s our time on this Earth. And we’re here not just for ourselves, but for the collective.”
Since that evening, the collective has been his focus. “Not everyone has to agree,” he said, “but if 20 to 30 percent of people do, we’ll have a world where no one is hungry, where everyone has a comfortable place to sleep, and where we don’t fight each other so much.”
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