REPORT AND TOOLKIT (EN – ES)
Agriculture accounts for over 9% of Colombia’s GDP, yet the sector remains one of its largest sources of greenhouse gas emissions and a key driver of land-use change. When global shocks drove input prices sharply upward in the wake of COVID-19 and the Russia-Ukraine conflict, Colombia responded by establishing the Agricultural Input Access Fund (FAIA) — a subsidy mechanism to support small and medium farmers’ access to seeds, fertilisers, and other inputs. While the fund has reached hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries across the country, it was not originally designed as a sustainability instrument, raising the question of whether it could be better aligned with Colombia’s ambitious climate and biodiversity commitments.
To address this, UNEP partnered with the Faculty of Economics at Universidad de los Andes to produce two complementary publications. The analytical study tracks green public investment in Colombian agriculture from 2011 to 2023, finding that it has remained marginal — rising only from 1.8% to 2.4% of total agricultural public investment — and is not systematically directed to areas of highest environmental need. Critically, it also presents the first impact evaluation of its kind for Colombia, finding no evidence that green public support underperforms conventional support on agricultural productivity; in the long run, green investments outperform traditional ones across most specifications. The policy toolkit then applies these insights directly to the FAIA, auditing its legal framework and the seven programmes implemented to date. It finds that, without differentiated incentives, over 94% of resources have flowed to conventional chemical inputs, and that the participation of rural women has fallen short of the fund’s own legal mandate. Second-phase programmes have introduced meaningful improvements, including graduated co-financing rates favouring domestically produced bioinputs, but these advances remain uneven.
Together, the two publications make a clear case: the evidence does not support the concern that greening agricultural support comes at the cost of productivity or food security. Colombia has the institutional foundations for a more sustainable FAIA — and both documents offer concrete recommendations to build on them.
Estudio Analitico (ES): Promover una transición hacia un apoyo sostenible a la agricultura en Colombia: seguimiento de los gastos públicos en inversiones verdes y sus impactos
Autores: Rachid Laajaj, Carolina Castro, Camilo de los Ríos, Juan Camilo Bernal Valbuena, Minhyuk Hong, Santiago Cubides Pava, Maria Camila Ortiz Alvarez
Toolkit (EN/ES): Enhancing the Inclusivity and Sustainability of the Fund for Access to Agricultural Inputs
Authors/Autores: Rachid Laajaj, Juan Camilo Bernal Valbuena, Minhyuk Hong, Carolina Castro, Santiago Cubides Pava
