Scaling agroecology and agroforestry through the TERRA programme

By reconceiving agriculture as ‘productive forests’, we can increase food production, conserve biodiversity, store more terrestrial and soil carbon, and improve climate resilience and mitigation. We can also generate better and more reliable incomes for family farmers, Indigenous Peoples, and traditional and local communities – who produce roughly 80% of the global food supply.

TERRA was launched at the 2025 climate change conference (COP30) as part of the Brazilian COP30 presidency’s Action Agenda and is led by the Brazilian Ministry of Agrarian Development and Family Farming (MDA).

What is IIED doing?

As one of the organisations that co-manages the Forest and Farm Facility (FFF), IIED has joined the strategic advisory board of TERRA, which has the Brazilian MDA, the FFF, the NOW Partners Foundation, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), the Agroecology Coalition and the Alliance Bioversity-CIAT (CGIAR) as its six founding members.

IIED shares TERRA’s commitment to a ‘mutirão’ (collective effort) approach, leveraging existing, proven delivery mechanisms to ensure rapid implementation. IIED believes the forest and farm producer organisations (FFPOs), knowledge networks, markets and finance required to transition to wider use of agroecology and agroforestry practices already exist in many places, but are disconnected and under-resourced.

TERRA will build collaborative partnerships with interested governments and established FFPO networks, strengthening relationships across networks and countries to enable greater adoption of agroecology and agroforestry. FFF is one of the programme’s designated finance mechanisms for delivering money to producer organisations under the GPFI. The other agreed finance mechanisms are managed by IFAD and NOW Partners Foundation.

The programme has identified five areas for accelerating this work:

1. Strengthening producer organisations and other stakeholders
2. Developing knowledge and strengthening skills
3. Improving seeds, bioinputs (such as biofertilisers and biopesticides), mechanisation and technology
4. Increasing value addition and market access, and
5. Making blended finance available and accessible.

To maximise success, TERRA intends to deploy these in parallel in each location, working with governments and FFPO partners – initially in the global South where smallholder and family farming are already a widespread and integrated part of people’s livelihoods and local and national economies – to identify approaches suited to each country.

It will begin with six core countries, where it will model ways to scale agroecological and agroforestry innovations and food system transitions. 

It will also support smaller-scale work in other countries through policy dialogues, knowledge exchanges and bilateral partner programmes. Find out more in TERRA’s action plan (PDF) and implementation methodology (PDF).