How Plantations International’s Sustainable Agricultural Practices Benefit the Environment: At Plantations International we consider our clients to be plantations partners. Your success is our success. With our broad range of products and services and an endless menu of custom tailored solutions. Plantations International has the resources and skills to make your farm, plantation or orchard commercially successful and environmentally sustainable. This concept of sustainable forest management ensures a corporate contribution to the country, its people and our future as well as maximizing the Company’s carbon sequestration. contribution, helping to combat global warming.
As food prices are closely linked to inflationary trends, owners of agricultural assets and those exposed to farming businesses possess a hedge against inflation. This is one key diversification benefit of the asset class. Agriculture has been shown to have low correlation with many other asset classes such as equities and corporate debt, which dominate the investment market. This means that including agricultural in a portfolio can provide significant diversification benefits, resulting in an increase in portfolio return or reducing overall portfolio risk. Population driven food demand remains the core base of demand for agricultural commodities. The demand for food is relatively inelastic to income, making demand for agricultural commodities less subject to an economic slowdown.
Despite multiple definitions for food security there are common themes or indicators that tend to appear and underline its characterization. These include food affordability, food availability and accessibility, food quality and safety, and existing natural resources. The FAO and The Economist both measure food security on a country based on these indicators at varying degrees. Furthermore, low levels of food security place significant stress on government expenditures. It forces governments to invest substantial resources in the short-term through social safety net programs and conditional cash transfers. It also increases their reliance on food imports which is detrimental to long term food self-sufficiency. The FAO has reported that high rates of malnutrition can lead to a GDP loss of as much as 4-5%.
With offices, plantations, and representatives across Asia, Europe, and Africa, Plantations International is a multinational plantation and farm management company that specializes in providing sustainable agricultural and forestry or “agroforestry” management services for its clients. Plantations International has clients ranging from private individuals to large landholders and corporate investors. We put teamwork, innovation, and our passion for creating “Ethical & Sustainable Capital” at the heart of everything we do.
Caloric Requirements: Not only is world population growing, but its diet is changing too. As people become more affluent they start eating more food, thereby increasing the necessity for more supply. Food consumption, in terms of kcal/person per day has consistently risen throughout the world. It has increased from an average of 2,360 kcal/person per day in the mid-1960s to 2,900 currently. This growth has been accompanied by significant structural change. Diets have shifted towards more livestock products (meat and dairy), cereals (coarse grains, wheat and rice) and away from staples such as roots and tubers. Tubers include potatoes, sweet potatoes and yams. Roots include carrots and turnips. Food wastage’s carbon footprint is estimated at 3.3 billion tonnes of CO2. Developing countries suffer more food losses during agricultural production, while in middle- and high-income regions, food waste at the retail and consumer level tends to be higher.
Different greenhouse gases have very different heat-trapping abilities. Some of them can even trap more heat than CO2. A molecule of methane produces more than 20 times the warming of a molecule of CO2. Nitrous oxide is 300 times more powerful than CO2. Other gases, such as chlorofluorocarbons (which have been banned in much of the world because they also degrade the ozone layer), have heat-trapping potential thousands of times greater than CO2. But because their concentrations are much lower than CO2, none of these gases adds as much warmth to the atmosphere as CO2 does. In order to understand the effects of all the gases together, Plantations International scientists tend to talk about all greenhouse gases in terms of the equivalent amount of CO2. Since 1990, yearly emissions have gone up by about 6 billion metric tons of “carbon dioxide equivalent” worldwide, more than a 20% increase. Plantations International is already seeing some of these changes occurring more quickly than they had expected. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, eleven of the twelve hottest years since thermometer readings became available occurred between 1995 and 2006.