McKinsey Center for Agricultural Transformation

Helping reduce poverty, improve climate resilience, create jobs, improve nutrition, and foster economic growth through successful agricultural transformations

The McKinsey Center for Agricultural Transformation draws together the firm’s expertise in agriculture, international development, and food security. The Center has flexibility in developing different engagement models with partners, including performance-based models and longer-term relationships. At its core, the Center is focused on accelerating agricultural transformations and improving food security for a range of public, private, and social sector entities.

Because the Center leverages McKinsey’s nuanced understanding of the private sector, deep expertise across diverse fields, and world-class analytics to improve decision making in agricultural transformations, we make a distinctive partner for governments, donors, companies, and civil society—enabling more effective and efficient use of resources to transform rural economies at the national and state levels as well as within industry sectors.

How we help clients

Transformation strategy

We partner with governments, donors, companies, and civil society to improve evidence-based planning and set priorities for accelerating agricultural transformation.

Private-sector engagement

We bring an “investor mind-set” to public-sector policies and support private investments needed to enable commercial opportunities that will create jobs and accelerate growth.

Delivery

Too often, transformation plans fail during implementation. We work closely with stakeholders across public and private sectors, bringing global best practices to drive on-the-ground implementation.

Building capacity

Transformation success depends on talented people—from top leadership to farmer-facing change agents. We tailor capacity-building tools based on global experience in transformation to in-country needs.

Data and analytics

McKinsey has a firmwide commitment to creating and applying next-generation analytics. We provide world-class agricultural transformation data and analytics to support partners.

Agricultural transformation challenges

David Fiocco, a Minneapolis-based partner, discusses key challenges in agricultural transformations.

Our approach

Convening power

The ability to gather talented practitioners from both private and public sectors, across diverse areas of expertise, is an important tool for achieving the kind of collaboration and cocreation needed for a successful agricultural transformation.

In-country relationships

We have worked on agricultural transformations in 32 countries around the world. We value our network of relationships with national and local leaders.

Data and analytics

On-the-ground decision makers need better analytics to support agricultural transformations. We provide geospatial insights, advanced artificial-intelligence systems, and integrated layers of data on farm-level productivity, markets, transportation, trade, and more. Our tools are built for use by people making tough decisions and balancing trade-offs.

Access to expertise

We have 75-plus agriculture and food experts and a dedicated research team with global coverage. But agricultural transformation also requires expertise in infrastructure, banking, trade, labor skills, nutrition, gender, youth, consumer behavior, energy, water, and more. We leverage McKinsey’s network to integrate world-class experts across all of these dimensions.

Understanding people

We have a particular focus on what we call the “soft side” of agricultural transformation—an understanding that capacity building among people and institutional innovation are at the core of a successful agricultural transformation. We are developing agricultural transformation leadership programs, and we have deep expertise in the kinds of organizational change needed to enable agricultural transformation.