It’s intuitive that investing in land sustainability and producing strong returns go together, said Antoine Bisson-McLernon. It’s a strong belief of his as the CEO and a partner at Fiera Comox Partners, which holds investments in agriculture and timberland.
“If you are investors with long-term pension funds, endowments (and) foundations, they want their land to be more fertile (and) more productive,” Bisson-McLernon told Nasser Alkahtani, executive director of the Riyadh-based Arab Gulf Programme for Development, or AGFUND, during a Sept. 25 panel at the 2024 Concordia Annual Summit in New York. “They will have more (and) want to save water. If their land is more fertile 15 (to) 20 years down the road, they will make better returns.”
Since its formation as a joint venture by Fiera Capital in 2016, the C$4.2 billion ($3.1 billion) Montreal-based alternatives manager has invested mainly in large-scale farms and has acquired about 5 million acres.
To keep its holdings thriving, the CEO noted Fiera Comox has invested significantly in technology, from buying a new water-efficient roof for an almond farm to soil-mapping satellites — “and it’s all very much aligned with investments.” For small farmers, these technologies are available through cooperatives, government initiatives and data sharing, he added.
But as to how to improve the amount of private capital going into forestry and agriculture, Bisson-McLernon pointed to a real-life study. With help from the AGFUND, Fiera Comox is looking to launch an afforestation fund that would involve “essentially planting trees on land that is currently bare in the Middle East and Africa,” he said, providing no further specific details.
There are some regions in the world where one can plant trees, and commercially, still make a return as Bisson-McLernon pointed to opportunities in getting paid for reducing carbon by replanting trees after harvesting them.
But he noted that in some parts of the world, the cost and infrastructure might not be enough to justify the return on private capital investments. For places in the EMEA region, for example, “this is where private-public partnerships with governments are so important.”
“You can have the expertise of private capital come in and be very efficient in planting those trees and in a partnership with governments to essentially plant trees,” he said. “That will be good for society, and that will have clean air. Also — very importantly — planting trees prevents land degradation.”
