The COmON Foundation

The COmON Foundation is a practical working foundation in Holland. Their policy is based on cooperating with partners who ‘act’ instead of ‘talk’. On their site you can find a lot of information about them.

About two years ago I met the director of The COmON Foundation, Mr. Hans van Poelvoorde, and we found out that we had common interest; we both wanted to reforest the world with trees and producing food.

So COmON decided to fund a project in Ecuador from the Fundacion ‘’Fuente de Vida’’. The project’s name is ‘’Agua, Vida y Naturaleza’’. The purpose of this project is to develop a financial tool for poor farmers, so they can start growing fruits and vegetables with the Groasis Technology. With the Groasis Technology the farmers can grow food, while they use about 70% less water! You can find more information on this page.

In the world we have approximately 300 million poor farmers. We also have approximately 2 Trillion hectares of dry wasteland. If each of these farmes exploits 7 hectares extra land, then we will solve the erosion problem, the climate problem and the food problem. However, all these farmers have no capital or guarantees, so they can not loan money. So the purpose of the COmON Foundation to develop this financial model is fantastic! When the COmON Foundation, in cooperation with Fuente de Vida from Ecuador, prove that you can have good working financial models, others can start to follow up on a big scale.

Now will you think, how much money do you need? Actually, not so much. We can replant the 2 billion hectares of wasteland for approximately 8 trillion US dollars. This sound like a lot of money but it is equal to the amount of money that our politicians have spent to save the banking system during the last five years.

So if there was enough money to save the banks, then I am sure that there will be enough money to save humanity. If we want to feed the 10 billion people in 2050, we need that 8 trillion dollars to invest in agriculture in the next twenty years. Thank goodness we have foundations like COmON to give the good example to us!

Pieter Hoff,
The Green Musketeer