India among 11 countries to receive investment for Regenerative Agriculture Projects
PepsiCo today announced the continuation of its global agriculture accelerator, the Positive Agriculture Outcomes (PAO) Fund, by granting funding to 14 business projects in India and 10 other countries to address some of the most intractable challenges facing agriculture today.
“We’re in a race to reach the world’s 1.5-degree target and, to do our part, PepsiCo has set a range of ambitious PepsiCo Positive goals, including expanding regenerative agriculture practices and building the resilience of those in our agricultural supply chain by preparing them for a changing climate,” said Rob Meyers, Vice President of Global Sustainable Agriculture.
Launched in August 2021, the PAO Fund offers PepsiCo market teams co-investment to accelerate diverse and innovative Positive Agriculture projects. The investments are designed to ‘de-risk’ promising initiatives while accelerating the development of innovative technologies and approaches that can help scale the adoption of regenerative agriculture practices.
In 2022, the PAO Fund is making investments in projects that span a range of commodities, supply chains, time horizons and PepsiCo business units, but all are focused on either testing a new regenerative technology or approach, helping farmers build climate resilience, or developing new sustainable “landscapes”. In total, the PAO Fund is providing ongoing support to over 20 different projects around the world through grants totalling more than $7.4 million awarded in 2021 and 2022.
“With support from the PAO Fund, we’ve been able to generate much greater engagement and innovation both at the farm level and through closer collaboration with our global teams,” said Haseeb Malik, Senior Manager of Agriculture APAC, PepsiCo.
Projects from the PAO Fund’s inaugural investment are the focus of PepsiCo’s latest, four-part digital video series, “Growing Our Future.” The series looks at how PepsiCo is working with farmers in Thailand to help them adapt to climate change, how farmers in Greece are adopting more efficient irrigation systems to adapt to increased drought, and how PepsiCo is supporting research in Brazil to help potato farmers improve soil health.
For India, the series elaborates on how PepsiCo has partnered with farmers in Punjab to develop kilns that can turn their agricultural waste into fertiliser known as biochar.
In recent years, PepsiCo India’s Pep+ (Pep Positive) agenda in the supply chain of potatoes have created awareness and impact in Punjab and West Bengal, helping farmers manage paddy crop residue by ploughing back into soils and conversion of paddy straw into biochar through the process of pyrolysis. PepsiCo India is also funding the infrastructure (retort kilns) to help growers in these states.
