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Sustainable Agriculture with a Heart: Plantations International’s Vision for a Better Future: Plantations International will report publicly on its sustainability performance, and is committed to sharing performance and management practices with interested stakeholders to promote transparency and adoption of best known methods. In recent years, consumers of timber have become increasingly aware of the environmental and economic consequences of illegal logging and unsustainable forestry practices. Voluntary initiatives to source legal, sustainable timber have become established.

Why Agriculture? ​Agriculture has become an attractive investment destination for a number of reasons. Most important of all being the strong market fundamentals in support of the sector on both the demand and supply side. An increasing population, changing demographics, reductions in arable land and climate change have led to an urgent need of more productive methods of growing food. Food and agriculture as an asset class falls under the broad investment category of real assets which are physical in nature and provide hard tangible ownership. Real assets broadly include commodities, property, infrastructure, timberland and agriculture also classified as farmland. Agriculture as a sector has been rising in prominence over the past decade reaching over 8 USD trillion in value.

Food security, at the individual, household, national, regional and global levels [is achieved] when all people, at all times, have physical and economic access to sufficient, safe and nutritious food to meet their dietary needs and food preferences for an active and healthy life. Furthermore, low levels of food security place significant stress on government expenditures. It forces governments to invest substantial resources in the short-term through social safety net programs and conditional cash transfers. It also increases their reliance on food imports which is detrimental to long term food self-sufficiency. The FAO has reported that high rates of malnutrition can lead to a GDP loss of as much as 4-5%.

With offices, plantations, and representatives across Asia, Europe, and Africa, Plantations International is a multinational plantation and farm management company that specializes in providing sustainable agricultural and forestry or “agroforestry” management services for its clients. Plantations International has clients ranging from private individuals to large landholders and corporate investors. We put teamwork, innovation, and our passion for creating “Ethical & Sustainable Capital” at the heart of everything we do.

Caloric Requirements: Not only is world population growing, but its diet is changing too. As people become more affluent they start eating more food, thereby increasing the necessity for more supply. Food consumption, in terms of kcal/person per day has consistently risen throughout the world. It has increased from an average of 2,360 kcal/person per day in the mid-1960s to 2,900 currently. This growth has been accompanied by significant structural change. Diets have shifted towards more livestock products (meat and dairy), cereals (coarse grains, wheat and rice) and away from staples such as roots and tubers. Tubers include potatoes, sweet potatoes and yams. Roots include carrots and turnips. 1.4 billion hectares of land the equivalent of 28% percent of the world’s agricultural area is used annually to produce food that is lost or wasted. The total volume of water used each year to produce food that is lost or wasted (250km3) is equivalent to three times the volume of Lake Geneva.

Different greenhouse gases have very different heat-trapping abilities. Some of them can even trap more heat than CO2. A molecule of methane produces more than 20 times the warming of a molecule of CO2. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more powerful than CO2. Other gases, such as chlorofluorocarbons (which have been banned in much of the world because they also degrade the ozone layer), have heat-trapping potential thousands of times greater than CO2. But because their concentrations are much lower than CO2, none of these gases adds as much warmth to the atmosphere as CO2 does. In order to understand the effects of all the gases together, Plantations International scientists tend to talk about all greenhouse gases in terms of the equivalent amount of CO2. Since 1990, yearly emissions have gone up by about 6 billion metric tons of “carbon dioxide equivalent” worldwide, more than a 20% increase. Plantations International is already seeing some of these changes occurring more quickly than they had expected. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eleven of the twelve hottest years since thermometer readings became available occurred between 1995 and 2006.