Project Highlights
Funders
GIZ
Partners
GIZ
Implementation dates
August 2018
-
March 2019
Commodities
Banana
Pineapple
Sugarcan
Beneficiaries
Farms and producers and their neighboring stakeholders in the production landscape
About the project
The “Biodiversity Check Agrícola” project closed a persistent gap in Central America and the Caribbean by creating a practical tool that helped farms recognize biodiversity’s value to production and improve good practices. It fostered open dialogue with managers and produced action plans with realistic, measurable goals—covering ecosystem services, micro-climate regulation, soil fauna, the role of forest patches for beneficial organisms, and riparian areas for flood control. Plans also addressed phasing out biodiversity-harming pesticides, managing invasive species and wildlife, and designing gardens and live barriers with native plants. The team ran a short consultation with producers and industry, field-tested the tool on a banana farm in Costa Rica, a pineapple farm in the Dominican Republic, and a sugarcane farm in Guatemala, and trained at least 30 agronomists and biologists across the three countries.
Outcomes
By project close, farms had a practical tool—Biodiversity Check Agrícola—to assess and strengthen biodiversity practices, guided by a custom manual and training resources for expert replication. Developed under GIZ’s Biodiversity and Business Program in Central America and the Dominican Republic, the tool helped the region’s agricultural sector reframe biodiversity conservation not as a cost, but as a source of on-farm and landscape benefits—and equipped producers to implement those gains efficiently at scale.