AGRIPROCITY: Helping farmers engage directly in global agri-food trade
Who Needs a Grain Company? Agriprocity Connects Farmers, Buyers and Strategic Partners directly! Agriprocity builds and maintains direct agri-food value chains between farmers and internationally based food processors. Agriprocity allows its partners to trade agricultural crops without intervention from global agri-commodity pricing mechanisms! Agriprocity’s contracts are long-term, transparent, and tailored to meet unique and exact quality specifications.
There’s a great need in the Middle East for many of the crops. The area is production light and demand heavy - the city of Dubai, specifically, is also a major trading and processing hub for several other markets. But getting volumes of grain to the region is challenging and expensive.
To tackle this issue, in 2013 Nicole Rogers founded Agriprocity.
As Canada’s Agricultural Trade Commissioner to the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Nicole was charged with facilitating the development of Canada’s agricultural export opportunities in the UAE (and wider Middle East region). In addition to acting as the Principal of Agriprocity, Nicole Rogers is a private sector delegate on the United Nations FAO panel on Near East Food Security and serves on the Advisory Board for Global AgInvesting Middle East.
In this role, Nicole came to recognize a deep need to address inefficiencies in the existing Canadian agricultural export trading model. She felt drawn back to her farming roots and set out to work directly with farmers to better position them in the global marketplace.
Farmers, Buyers, Strategic Partners: “Reciprocity is at the root of everything we do” – is the principal motto of Agriprocity. Agriprocity's goal is to identify and adopt mutually beneficial, long-term growth strategies for these parties. It is from this foundation that true reciprocity in agricultural trading can grow.
In particular, Agriprocity connects farmers directly with importers and food processors in the agricultural import dependent Middle Eastern market.
(Source: The Agriprocity Model)
To that end, Agriprocity identifies direct partnership opportunities between farmers and Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)-based agri-food processors. By encouraging collaboration amongst agricultural trading partners, greater security, efficiency, and sustainability within production and procurement is achieved. Agriprocity’s disruptive model to action change allows farms to work together to build the necessary economies of scale to secure longer-term and transparent export contracts that will add greater value to their farm.
(Source: The Agriprocity Model)
Here’s what Agriprocity ‘s partners (farmers, buyers, strategic partners) say about the Agriprocity’s disruptive model in action:
“Because of my direct relationship with the buyer, I was able to further diversify my revenue streams and receive new recurring income from on farm storage and handling.”
-20,000 acre advisory farm located in Saskatchewan, Canada
"We considered investments in farmland, but there are so many risks involved and it’s heavily capital intensive. Through Agriprocity, we were able to access farms with greater intimacy and build the direct sourcing model that we envisioned only possible with direct investment."
-CEO, Asian based flour and feed mill
"We are investing in innovation within the food sector in south-east Africa. Agriprocity focuses on targeted marketing activities that allows us to focus on our core competencies and yield greater and more predictable returns to our investors."
-CEO, EU based Agri-Food Investment Fund
“It’s not a lowest price system either .. Instead, this container-based system is built on a cost of production plus margin model and allows for farmers to close up a container and transfer title on that grain without it even leaving the yard. Sound too good to be true? With any system there are risks, of course, and containers still use rail to move, but” Agriprocity is doing just that by connecting farmers directly to end-users, cutting out the middle-man-grain handlers with a global reach (Realagriculture)
(Source: Agriprocity)
Agriprocity is committed to a consultative approach to trading, purposeful crop growing and a contractual focus that aims to best mitigate trading risk at both ends of the supply chain, i.e. to capture efficiency by being a total disruption to the current supply chain model to appeal to a global farm audience.
Last but not least.
Since 2016 Agriprocity has became a GODAN (Global Open Data for Agriculture & Nutrition) partner thus commiting to #opendata to help farmers engage in trade in order to increase farm incomes!
You can also become a GODAN partner and help support global efforts to make agricultural and nutritionally relevant data globally available and unrestricted!
Any questions and suggestions regarding Agriprocity can be addressed to [email protected]
Sources:
On the 16th of May, 2016, GODAN contributed at 2016 ICT4D Conference
