About Us

Bringing together McKinsey’s expertise and analytics to support partners as they accelerate agricultural transformation

Who are we?

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.

Why agricultural transformation?

Most industrialized nations began their economic ascent with an agricultural transformation. When rural economies develop, the changes can be profound. In just 11 years, for example, Vietnam reduced its poverty rate from 58 percent to 19 percent; in one generation, Indonesia nearly tripled its GDP. An agricultural transformation holds the potential to bring economic growth, more jobs, poverty reduction, climate resilience, reduced malnutrition, and women’s economic empowerment.

But transformations are complex, and many stall along the way. Success depends on some key areas, including work across public and private sectors, talented and empowered leaders, good institutions to support change, evidence-based policy making, and smart investments. Our mission is to employ the tools and assets of McKinsey to work with partners diagnosing challenges and creating solutions that will accelerate agricultural transformation.

Featured capabilities

Over the past five years, McKinsey’s agriculture group has worked on nearly 1,900 projects in 69 countries for more than 370 clients. The McKinsey Center for Agricultural Transformation leverages the agriculture group as well as the Public Sector and Social Sector practices and many other resources in the firm to bring industry and country expertise, private-sector insights, and world-class analytics.

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.