CaixaBank underlines that agri-food cooperatives area

The territorial director of CaixaBank in Castilla-La Mancha, Jaime Campos, highlighted this Friday that "agro-food cooperatives are the main economic engines of the towns in which they are established and also contribute to the settlement of families in rural settings”.

Campos has expressed himself in these terms at the opening of the second day of the 'VIII Congress of Agro-food Cooperatives of Spain' which is being held at the 'El Greco' Conference Center in Toledo this Thursday and Friday, and which was also attended by Sergio Gutiérrez, the director of AgroBank, CaixaBank's line of business aimed at agri-food activity. The sectoral meeting, entitled 'Cooperatives, together towards a sustainable future', was closed by the President of the Economic and Social Council, Antón Costas, and the president of Agro-food Cooperatives of Spain, Ángel Villafranca, and has hosted several round tables on R&D, environmental and social sustainability.

The territorial director of CaixaBank in Castilla-La Mancha has highlighted that the agri-food cooperatives and the financial institution have "common values" such as "teamwork", "professionalism" and "dedication to our partners or customers". “For this reason, we go hand in hand and will continue to do so, because rural areas are one of the main points of the new CaixaBank Strategic Plan that we have recently presented and that reinforces our commitment to the Spanish agri-food sector through the largest network of branches and specialized managers”, Campos has committed.

In this sense, he underlined that CaixaBank and Andalusian Agro-Food Cooperatives have recently signed an agreement to finance investments carried out in the region by farms linked to improving olive cultivation.

"AgroBank's value proposition combines the development of what we believe are the best products and services with close and comprehensive advice through more than 3,000 specialized managers throughout Spain, who have extensive knowledge of the sector and maintain continuous training. ”, remarked the director.

CaixaBank, which has one out of every two agricultural customers in Spain and "aspires to continue growing", has more than 1,650 rural branches in towns with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants, in addition to another 1,175 specialized AgroBank branches, the brand that develops a line of business of CaixaBank aimed at the agri-food activity. "This network allows us to respond to demands and be close to our customers, who can rest easy because we are not going to abandon municipalities in which we are the only entity", Campos has transferred, who has also recalled that during 2021, CaixaBank supported to the sector with 17,400 million euros in financing in the country as a whole.

In Castilla-La Mancha, AgroBank supported the sector with almost 1,380 million last year, thus reinforcing its leadership in the region. AgroBank has nearly 33,000 agricultural clients in the five provinces, where to serve the agricultural sector it has 86 specialized branches, with almost 250 specialist managers who have extensive knowledge of the sector and maintain continuous training. In addition to the specific AgroBank network, CaixaBank complements its presence in less populated areas with 75 branches located in rural Castilian-Manchego municipalities (less than 10,000 inhabitants).

Sustainability and digitization

The territorial director of CaixaBank in Castilla-La Mancha has told the auditorium that AgroBank works to "accompany" its clients in the different challenges facing the agri-food sector, including sustainability and digitization, and that they have become , he said, “in key elements in the entity's financing activity”.

He explained that, in this sense, the bank has launched new products such as loans specialized in ecological transition and renewable energy, with the aim of promoting more sustainable production with less climate impact.

Campos has also highlighted the extension of the collaboration agreement with the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, represented on Thursday by Minister Luis Planas, to jointly promote actions that favor greater efficiency and competitiveness in the agricultural, fishing and and Spanish agri-food, as well as preferential lines of financing and with the aim of promoting the internationalization of Spanish agri-food companies.

Likewise, it has stressed that the Next Generation Funds of the European Union are "an opportunity for the transformation of the agri-food sector" and that CaixaBank makes available to its clients "the necessary tools to access them".

Also looking to the future, the territorial director of CaixaBank in Castilla-La Mancha has pointed out that the financial institution promotes an ecosystem of agricultural innovation in Spain through a program launched together with the European Innovation Council (EIC) to accelerate the digitization of the agro-sector implementing national and international start-up solutions, and that AgroBank is part of the group of founding companies of 'La Digitizadora Agraria', the largest transformation project in the sector in Spain, which will attend the PERTE Agroalimentario.

In relation to the specific initiatives of Castilla-La Mancha, it has highlighted the creation of the AgroBank Chair 'Mujer, Empresa y Mundo Rural', created by CaixaBank and the University of Castilla-La Mancha (UCLM) with the aim of collaborating in the study of gender equality and the empowerment of rural women as a strategy to fix the population to the territory, as well as social commitment in the territory in the hands of the "la Caixa" Foundation and MicroBank, the social bank of CaixaBank.