World Bank Approves New Grant to Boost Climate-Resilient Farming and Food Security in Morocco

Dec 22, 2025

The World Bank’s Board of Directors has approved a $4 million grant from the Livable Planet Fund (LPF) to Morocco to provide additional funding for the Transforming Agri-food Systems Program. The program aims to strengthen Morocco’s agri-food system against climate change while improving food safety and quality.

This new grant supplements the $250 million initially approved for the program in December 2024. Building on the initial focus on scaling climate-smart practices, the additional financing tackles demand-side constraints faced by small- and medium-scale farmers to accelerate the transition of Morocco’s rainfed cereal sector to conservation agriculture. The program will reach approximately 1,200 farmers across 20,000 hectares. Support will be delivered via digital e-vouchers that lower production costs by offering mechanization services like direct seeding, and access to climate-resilient seeds. This project will also help cereal and legume farmers – including women and youth – gain financial access and reach better markets by efficiently pooling their harvests, facilitate financial inclusion and improve access to remunerative markets for cereal and legume producers through smart aggregation of the output generated under the project.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids