“Farmers cannot bear the costs of sustainability alone when the benefits are shared throughout the entire chain…”
Daniela Mariuzzo is a food engineer, M.Sc in Unicamp and phD in Biotechnology from the University of Barcelona. She has over 25 years of experience in sustainability, agribusiness, and sustainable finance, having worked at Rabobank, Monsanto, IDH, and IFC (World Bank Group). She participated in the governance of international agricultural sustainability initiatives such as RTRS, GTPS, and GRSB, and led the financial sustainability strategy at Reg.IA, focusing on regenerative agriculture, access to capital, and the socio-environmental valuation of farmers.
AgriBrasilis – How to turn socio-environmental performance into financial returns for the farmer?
Daniela Mariuzzo – We need to start with an essential question: the farmer cannot bear the costs of sustainability alone when the benefits are shared throughout the chain.
Improving soil management, using water efficiently, and conserving native vegetation can reduce risks and increase the resilience of production. But these gains are not always financially recognized.
We need to connect verifiable results to concrete benefits: more suitable credit conditions, differentiated commercial contracts, access to markets and, where appropriate, remuneration for environmental services. This requires reliable information, but also buyers and financiers willing to use it.
For me, the issue is simple: sustainability also needs to generate value for those who produce.
AgriBrasilis – In what ways are environmental risks influencing credit and investment decisions? Which environmental indicators are most relevant?
Daniela Mariuzzo – Environmental and climate risks already influence credit because they can directly affect repayment capacity. A prolonged drought, soil degradation, or a restriction on land use are not external issues to the business: they can compromise productivity, costs, and guarantees.
In my experience with financial institutions, the challenge is to translate these factors into credit decisions that are proportionate to the risk.
I consider environmental and land compliance, the history of native vegetation conversion, water availability, soil conditions, and exposure to extreme weather events to be relevant. In certain operations, emissions and biodiversity are also important.
However, there is no universal list. The indicators need to make sense for the activity, the region, and the financing term. And they should serve not only to exclude risks but also to identify opportunities for improvement.
AgriBrasilis – What mechanisms can enable financing for farmers transitioning to more sustainable practices?
Daniela Mariuzzo – This is one of the biggest challenges of the transition: the producer invests today, but part of the benefits only appear after a few harvests. Recovering soil or implementing integrated systems may require resources, technical assistance and adaptation time. It is unreasonable to expect him to assume all this risk alone.
We need credit with terms and grace periods compatible with the production cycle, guarantees, risk sharing mechanisms and blended finance structures.
Technical assistance is as important as financial resources, because it helps transform investment into results.
I also consider it essential to recognize improvement trajectories. If we only finance those who have already achieved high sustainability standards, we will fail to support precisely those farmers who need to make the transition.
AgriBrasilis – You lead the financial strategy at Reg.IA. What have been the main lessons learned from the project so far?
Daniela Mariuzzo – At Reg.IA, a key lesson was understanding, in practice, the difference between demonstrating socio-environmental performance and successfully transforming it into economic value. Information can be technically excellent and yet not find anyone willing to pay for it.
Therefore, in the financial strategy, we seek to understand who uses this information, what problem it solves, and how to structure services that have demand and long-term economic sustainability.
Another lesson is that monitoring and verification need to be reliable, but also accessible. A solution that is too sophisticated can become unfeasible for the producer or for the financier.
We are working with complementary possibilities for value generation, considering different producer profiles and market needs.
The lesson, for me, is that environmental data only produce transformation at scale when they effectively enter into commercial and financial decisions.
AgriBrasilis – What is catalytic capital and why is it important for financing regenerative agriculture?
Daniela Mariuzzo – I like to explain catalytic capital by its function: it is the resource used to enable investments that, under traditional market conditions, would be unlikely to happen or would have a limited scale.
It can take the form of guarantees, concessional resources, subordinated capital or technical support, depending on the structure.
In regenerative agriculture, this makes a difference because the costs of change often come before the returns. Catalytic capital can help spread risk and attract banks and commercial investors to finance this transition phase.
But it’s not simply about offering cheap money. The aim is to demonstrate that certain models are financeable and, over time, reduce the need for concessional support. This is how a promising experience can turn into a market.
AgriBrasilis – The lady states that Brazil has advantages in attracting sustainable capital. What are these advantages and how can they be converted into more investments?
Daniela Mariuzzo – Brazil has advantages that are difficult to find in a single country: agricultural scale, scientific knowledge about tropical production, technological capacity, and great opportunities to recover degraded areas and increase productivity without converting new native vegetation.
But potential doesn’t automatically translate into investment. We need legal certainty, reliable data, well-structured projects, risk management, and demonstrable results.
It is also necessary to bring farmers, buyers, banks, investors, and public policies closer together so that good initiatives do not remain isolated.
I see important opportunities, but I prefer not to treat sustainable capital as something guaranteed. Investors need to see returns, manageable risks, and execution capacity. Brazil can offer that.
Our task is to transform real advantages into financeable operations, in which productivity and conservation go hand in hand.
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