 Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to this Dragonstone pitching session. So basically, the LDN Fund is intended to turn a challenge, the Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs, into an opportunity by being a major source of catalytic finance, investing in sustainable land use. And the fund is especially taking the challenge of bringing private capital in these new sectors in order to help the landscape investment area become a real asset class. And so you can see on this first slide the two logos of the entities that have teamed up to create such a fund. On the one hand, the UN Convention to Combat Disertification. And on the other, Mirova, a management company, subsidiary of Natix's group, a French banking group. And for the past six months, we have carried out a full market analysis, as well as a feasibility study to come to the conclusion of relevant positioning for the fund. And by the way, a report called Unlocking the Market for Land Degradation Neutrality is available today and released today at the Global Landscape Forum. You can find it at the table outside of the conference. And so the main outcomes of this report is to explain how the fund, the LDN fund, should rely on the left hand side on a relevant investment approach and on the right hand side on a tailored structuring principle. So regarding the investment approach, what is important, of course, is to address land degradation and to promote projects that contribute to land rehabilitation or degradation avoidance. In other words, the fund is really promoting, in general, sustainable land use. So what are the main sectors targeted? We intend to target sectors of sustainable agriculture, for instance, agroforestry projects, tree crop projects or sustainable cattle, for example. In the forestry sector, of course, there are very good reforestation or afforestation projects. And we also see attractive projects in the field of so-called green infrastructures, so for instance, tree planting in urban area that contribute to stormwater runoff or combination of agriculture and production of renewable energy. And of course, the scope of the fund is worldwide because SDGs are a global objective by definition, so we intend to invest in a project worldwide. And in terms of eligibility criteria, it's also, of course, important for a project to meet strict environmental and social standards and have a potential for scalability, replicability, and of course, being bankable to attract the private sector. And so the relevant investment approach found is really providing what the market need. And based on the market analysis, we really see that to finance an important capex that will transform the land use, we need to provide long-term financing that can be repaid by this new land use over time. But financing is not sufficient. We also need to bring technical assistance. And this is why, alongside the fund, the technical assistance facility financed by Donner will also be created to help the project become investment-ready. And also, what is critical is to provide governance and coordination with other public initiatives. And to facilitate, again, and create value with the project, we have decided not to do this by ourselves. There are great forces out there. People have been creating this nascent sector for the past year. So the idea is to leverage an existing initiative and team up with large corporations that are willing to improve their supply chains and also with landscape investment specialists that have implemented pilot projects and are willing to scale them up. So this is the main idea for this investment approach. And we think that there are critical elements there to meet success. On the other side, while we believe the asset class is really attractive, it's a nascent market. So we need to find adapted structuring principles to attract the private investors. And the main elements that came of our work is that, first of all, we need to propose a robust investment vehicle. We need to speak the same language as investors are used to speaking and providing a regulated investment fund, so namely, an alternative investment fund under EU regulation that provides sufficient comfort to investors to be managed, privately managed by a regulated management company, namely, Rover, that has internal risk compliance, legal departments, and a team of experts with skills in the field of commodity finance, structured finance, project finance. The idea is not to reinvent the wheel that apply existing techniques for this new sector. And the other key element is the layered structure that will be adopted, which consists of providing different risk return shares for the fund. There are junior shares to be subscribed mainly by donors and governments that would be repaid and reimbursed after senior shares. The senior shares are those that are paid in priority, so they have a better risk return profile. And the fact that the junior share exists is a critical and catalytic element to raise, to reach a critical size and raise more massive capital from the private sectors. And on top of this layered structure, the fund may also issue notes with higher liquidity and lower risk to attract even more private capital. So, as you understand, the main added value for this project is really to assemble the various pieces of the puzzle in order to bring scale in the market, provide visibility to the sectors, and unlock the market for land degradation neutrality. Thank you very much. Okay, thank you very much, Gautier. My dear jurors, are there any clarification questions that you would like to ask or no? Okay, then Tom, how would you as an, how would an investor basically evaluate the return on this investment and the impact it has? Not easily, would be my initial answer, but that may well come from the terms of this panel that we're having and there may be many other documents that I've not seen to do that. The things that I would start with, this is a fund that is dealing with rehabilitation and I assume the fund has specifications as to what it is that I am buying when I buy into the fund. In other words, is it an equity return? Is it a debt return? I can't tell that here. You may well have that specified. So it's a little hard for me to answer. On the whole, I would, when I'm dealing with a fund, given whatever the particular terms and conditions of the fund would be, expect a benchmarked commercial return that I can look at with a variety of other funds. Now, one of the questions that I would have that would help me to answer that would be, and you may again have this, please forgive me if I'm going over things that have been done, but I mean there are many different types of rehabilitation projects. I suppose the biggest one that comes to mind immediately in these days of an El Nino year would be peatlands in Indonesia that are creating such a disastrous flow of carbon into the atmosphere because of the combustion effects and particularly the drying of this year. I guess I would like to have a better sense of whether that sort of rehabilitation is covered because generally that involves flooding the lands, again taking out systems that have been put in to create navigable waters to access these. It's a little hard to see what the revenue flow is that I would be looking at for this return. In other words, it would seem to be a highly publicly charged activity and so I might like to see the returns described that could come from different carbon markets that one might imagine over the life of this fund being the source of my return. And that could be that these are broad trading markets under some sort of a generalized red plan. It could be a binational Indonesian, Japanese bilateral arrangement that is discussed in the Paris Accords. So for pure things, I would like to see that. For something like investment in the rehabilitation of lands that have been trampled by cattle in the Brazilian savanna, there is a commercial flow that's there and what I need, and again, this is not critical of this, but what I need to answer the question are data about those particular types of activities. The only question that I would highlight is that in the white paper, I did see that one of the criteria for two of the criteria are that the fund would take into account in informing its portfolio of investments of what is called readiness to invest and it says the LDN fund does not intend to offer subsidies. So particular projects that have already reached a maturity stage with the potential for preliminary technical assistance provided through the technical assistance facility that's associated with the fund. I would be quite interested to understand exactly what that implies if it doesn't offer subsidies, it would seem that the investor could expect the commercial return and perhaps it is simply the difference between the cost of borrowing of this firm and the cost of borrowing of another investor. That would describe that, but that would be both an important constraint on what I thought were the non-commercial returns and then after, if it's a commercial return, then I would expect the benchmarking that I saw earlier. Okay, thank you. Now, Elvira, how would you rate the uniqueness of the proposal that we just listened to? Well, that's a nice question. Before I start, let me just briefly highlight that I'm sitting in for somebody who's I think cruising above London and Kent land, so here I am, you have to deal with me. I am a fund manager, but I will not give it back to Mirova, but rather share the experience that we have gained over the last 10 years, undergoing the diligence as a various investors, private, public, family offices, et cetera. So we're being quits on a monthly basis by various investors, so I very much relate to what you said today, and it's a horror job to present two years' work, if not longer, in five minutes, so thank you for that. We will have the breakout session, sir. Very good, very good. I would want to answer the question in a broader sense, is it unique, and what does that actually mean? I think it's very unique to tackle the challenges that you've outlined on a global scale. I think nobody's dared that before, and that will give you sleepless nights for sure. And it is very much unique to be doing this with what you called implementing partners, if I understood this correctly, but this is also where my questions would come from. From the funds that we manage from what we see in the investment sphere, what we've learned is the more specialized you are, the more focused you are, which trickles down in the focused nature of the capital that you're raising, in the focused assets that you do, the easier it typically is. Now what I heard is you have these nexus topics, you have agriculture and forestry, I think that can be combined, but I found it hard to actually understand where the green infrastructure component comes in. How will that interrelate? What does it do to your capital structure? What does it do to your asset class? What does it do to you wanna be an AIF, so fully regulated, highly governed fund, so things like risk limits, diversification limits come into play, not sure where this is gonna be domiciled, but you also need to explain the asset classes to your regulator. So these were my immediate questions because it goes then hand in hand with a reporting load to all parties. And of course, diverse capital bases, diverse investors are lovely, unless you have to deal with them. So that certainly is an aspect. If you need to cater to too many agendas, that can easily be quite a challenge. Yeah, very unique, I would say, but I found it easier to understand the liability side of your business and the asset side, as I already said. And what I would want more clarity on is actually how do you define success and impact? What is it at the end of the day that the fund really stands for? Sorry, if I'm eating into your feedback. And how do you actually ensure that you deliver? Whose fund is it at the end of the day? Is it Miroba's fund? Is it UN's fund? Is it somebody else's fund? And what follows from that? How is the incentive structure built? How do you make sure that whoever is party to what delivers and how all of that interplays? But again, I think you have all the answers. You've only been given five minutes, so yeah. I love the TA component. I think that's very, very important. But again, if you can be clearer in how actually that strengthens your business case, that'd be very nice. I'll stop here, thanks. The first, I didn't get a clear sense of the size of the fund that you think you can raise or want to build. So I don't know whether you can give me some rough, yeah. So that matters, obviously. The second thing is that if you think you, if you think a billion is feasible as a capital raise, then from how many sources? I mean, how many investors do you think you need to get to a billion? And can you really be sure that they're aligned with your mission? When I speak from very direct experience here, that it's fine when things are going well, that sometimes it isn't when things are going not so well. So to raise a billion from a wide range of investors, you need to be really, really sure that they are 100% with all of your mission, including the modest amount you will spend on technical assistance. Believe me, they'll focus on that if anything goes wrong. So that's the first thing. The second thing is you're attempting to, one more time with feeling, build a new asset class. And so because of the novelty, you're going to need to be extra careful about that alignment of interest, including all of the standard compensation for fund management that is on offer, the range of in the marketplace. And because it's a new asset class, I don't know precisely what your term is. I mean, one of the great difficulties about accumulating assets that have these aspirations attached to them is that they're not susceptible to easy realization in ready-made markets. So the term is really important. And I think building a blind pool of capital for a fixed term with a wide range of projects is really hard. I mean, ideally, you want permanent capital in our dreams, but if you have term capital, you need length and a high degree of flexibility to cope with the fact that many of these investments will not be ready in a standard private equity term, for example. So I'm really curious to know how do you access quite large amounts of capital when your structure is both novel and not susceptible to the easy liquidity, which is partly a question Tom was asking, because it's not clear how much of this is ready for large liquid capital markets and how much is going to be illiquid and long-term and tied up in complicated investment structures. And then I was also going to ask the question Elvira asked, which is, if ultimately you want to get this asset class established and push it into the mainstream, then you have a very difficult judgment to make about what standards of, if you like, non-financial performance you want to promote. I don't think you should compromise on that personally, but don't underestimate how difficult that is to do and assume that much of the market will be very interested in the meeting but won't actually invest today. So it may well be that you have to build your longer-term strategy on perhaps a smaller amount when investors you are definitely going to be aligned with who do want those objectives and are prepared to pay you to assess the outcomes and then go back into the marketplace when you've proved a few people and go and get some more. Okay, thank you all. I saw that Goodyear was nodding, the public couldn't see it, he was writing down all the questions so I think it will be a very, very interesting breakout session. Thank you very much and thank you Goodyear. So our second pitch, it will present the launch of a new fund by Altilia Ecosphere in the area of sustainable ocean development. It will be brought to us by David Barley. So David, why should we turn from landscapes into seascapes? That's found out. Good afternoon everybody. Good afternoon dragons or in our sector we'd like to call you sharks. So why are we talking about the ocean at a landscape event? Well, in short, it's important. We live on a blue planet. The ocean covers 71% of the earth and for millennia it's really shaped human evolution, culture and history. The oceans generate more than half of the oxygen that we breathe and the foundation for the global water cycle which again underpins global agriculture. They directly feed over a billion people on a daily basis. The oceans also absorb between 20 and 35% of global carbon emissions and in terms of biodiversity they include a wondrous array of habitats and species from tiny plankton to the largest creature that has ever lived on earth, the blue whale. Importantly, the ocean underpins our global economy. WWF estimated that the services delivered by bio-resources are worth over 2.5 trillion annually and UNEP, that over 60% of the world's GNP comes from within 100 kilometers of our coasts. Globally, revenue from seafood exceeds 190 billion annually and ocean tourism generates some 161 billion annually. Agriculture and tourism combined provide over 300 million jobs worldwide. Yet all of this apparent value is at risk. Centuries of over exploitation mean that 90% of global fish stocks become either fully exploited or over exploited. Deforestation of mangroves exceeds the rate of loss of terrestrial tropical forests by some three to five times. 50% of the world's corals have disappeared within the last century and the total acidity of the oceans has increased by 26% since the industrial period. So we're launching the Althelia Sustainable Ocean Fund which is a public, private and finance partnership to bring meaningful scale and transformative investments to sustainable ocean and coastal development projects globally. The fund will generate returns through originating, structuring and providing transitional finance to sustainable fisheries and agriculture projects, seafood supply chains, and broader seascape projects which include blue carbon access to energy and finding new ways to finance marine protection. We're aiming to put up to 100 million to work over eight years across a portfolio of around 20 projects. We've developed a pipeline of opportunities to be invested over 2016, 17 and 18. Today I'm going to unpack the first area that I mentioned, sustainable fishery investment. The investment thesis is relatively simple. Better managed fisheries and coastal habitats are more profitable in the longer term than poorly managed ones. Research by EDF, a partner to the fund, suggests that a global scale, sustainably managed fisheries, could be more than three times as profitable as a business as usual scenario. So we'll invest into enterprises and that could be co-operative or private sector enterprises that support the recovery of fishery biomass and enable value to be added to landed catch. I'm going to provide a walkthrough of an example, how that will work. So this is the Acha. Paya de Acha is a type of shellfish. It's a project based in the lagoon of La Paz, which is a city in the south of Baja California. It's a commercial shellfishing joint venture between the community of El Mangalito and an NGO that's been doing capacity development work there for six years called NOSSE. Effectively, NOSSE has been working with a community of 100 fishermen and 500 individuals that derive their livelihood from the fishery. And they have persuaded the community to implement a managed access system to the lagoon. Currently, the population of the lagoon, the shellfish population, shall I say, is three million shells. If you restrict access to that, it can reproduce up to three times that population annually. And research suggests that the carrying capacity is 65 million shells. So we're going to invest effectively into implementing managed access on the lagoon and into the supply chain around that so that the community who have set up a cooperative can harvest at a sustainable level. That's about 20% of the carrying capacity and that they can then brand that and market the shellfish into local markets in Baja, California, into Mexico City and eventually into the United States. Effectively, the fund will provide the project investment for the infrastructure for managed access and it will derive a return from repayment of a loan and potentially a benefit share if a certain threshold is exceeded. It's anticipated that the project will result in 200 jobs being supported and a further 500 family members being supported by the project. And so let me talk a little bit about our approach and where we're coming from. What we're effectively doing is taking what we've developed through the Alphelia Climate Fund and that we know works on land and applying it in a new sector, the marine environment. So four key components of that. A clear investment mechanism. So we look for diversified project cash flows, occurring from certified commodities, rights, quotas, products and ecosystem services, thereby achieving diversification of risks across the portfolio. We will make investments into projects in the form of loans and the idea is that they will tailored to enable transition to sustainability. So that effectively means flexibility around debt service, potentially repayment holidays, bullet repayments, et cetera. But we will also seek to benefit from the transition to sustainability. So that could be from a proportionate sharing yield from an uplifting value created from the investment. The overall mechanism allows for enhanced yield structure. It provides optionality upside for the fund but also a natural exit at the end of the tenor of the fund. The second feature is strong local partnerships and scientific partnerships at the fund level. So we have the active involvement now of Conservation International and Environmental Defense Fund at the fund level. They are acting as technical and scientific advisors to the fund and serve on the funds expert board. And on the ground we have a strict policy of them involving projects stakeholders, local NGOs and other kind of interested parties at a local level to ensure that there is alignment of interest and that enables us to effectively manage risk in an improved way and also identify the potential to scale up investments. So the third feature is we are selecting mature and semi-mature projects and then looking for opportunities to scale. So the case study that I presented, we visited that project and we've done some initiative diligence and we've identified five or six further opportunities along the peninsula where the same model could be applied and that's key. So for every dollar that we invest we're looking for the opportunity to invest the next five or six dollars. Our values, we have a strict investment decision process and this is built around the core ESG, environmental, social and governance sustainability thesis. We're looking for projects that can demonstrate conservation of threatened or at risk species, biodiversity or habitats. We're looking for positive impacts on the lives of local stakeholders, communities and economies. And we're looking for sustainable best practices to be incorporated into the supply chains of whatever product we get behind and invest in. So I'll finish up by saying how we're moving forward. We're aiming to reach a first place for the fund during this calendar year. Two features that could be of interest to investors is we are quite far advanced negotiating a first loss facility for private side investors with a major bilateral. And we're also looking to repeat the innovative conservation notes mechanism that we have for the Alphelia Climate Fund which would enable smaller impact driven investors to invest into the fund. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Elvira, can you please assist the investors in the room in evaluating the return on this investment? How would you do that? I think I would repeat what was said with regard to the first proposal. I think one simply needs more clarity on what exactly is the asset class, what exactly is the risk that one would be taking and what are also the impact considerations. The higher the impact you want, the more capacity building monitoring you need to do on the ground. Most likely the longer out the return will be for some of the investors. So I think there needs to be more clarity on that exactly what maybe ties back to what I said earlier. What exactly is the objective of the fund? Is it to sustain the source fish? Is it to maintain livelihoods of the fishers? Is it to protect the marina? What exactly is it? Or is it the multitude? Or is it interdependent objectives, which I assume it is, but maybe it wasn't so clearly presented. But again, five or seven minutes, whatever it was, it's very short. So I think it is maybe from an immediate perception a more tangible asset class than what we heard earlier. You also seem to zoom in on certain regions and then try it there and then try to replicate it, which sounds good, raises other issues of diversification and risk management. But that's because if something hits, then it hits across that segment where you try to intervene into the market. So yeah, difficult to say what really return expectations could be, but maybe a couple of other questions. When we look at assets like that, projects like that, always the question of local law comes in, local regulation, local communities, local stakeholders, how are you going to manage that? Where exactly is the expertise for this type of asset class, either with you or with whoever is engaged in the network? And what does it actually mean for the currencies you will provide for, I assume this is not the only deal you would go after, you would look at other countries as well. So how are you going to manage that also from the liability side or from your hatching side to provide responsible capital? Same question could have been posed to the other pitch as well. And then linked to the expertise for this type of asset class, how are you going to source further deals? What is the filter process for eligible deals or projects, sorry for the word deal, but could have as well said transactions. And one other topic came up when I was listening to you is, how do you benchmark what you think are your criteria of success, your objectives, your impact desires to existing benchmarks, existing certificates and labels, the Marine Institute Council and others. Where are you in that? Are you more severe in the selection? Are you a little bit more relaxed? Does it depend? These would be interesting questions to follow up on. Thank you. Now, James, the uniqueness of the proposal. Yes, I could have just one second because I wanted to emphasise the law and not just the domestic law or the local rules, but international law. This is an area, a couple of us at least out here, done some work on in the past. And what you're trying to do is re-imagine landscapes that are subject to all sorts of difficulties in international law and domestic law, real contests over the access to those resources. And I think it's something you're going to have to build in to your analysis of maybe even how it's a further conversation about how the jurisdictional issues might limit or even attract some of your investments. But let me properly answer the question, which is that this is very innovative and about time too. I really do like the idea that attention is being placed on this enormous resource that is improperly valued by our economic systems, which by the way is a major issue that much of the value that I think you would create through investment will struggle to be reflected in your returns just because of the newness, the novelty of it. I particularly like the fact that you've thought through how you might combine public and private money. I think you've sensibly angered a modest raise of 100 million. The first loss of 30, I like the conservation notes, I always like because it does offer scope for smaller investors or other conservation groups or even ultimately individuals to have a small piece of the investment effort. And I've always liked that. I think that's innovative and will be productive in this case. I think you will find that once you've opened up this box, you won't have any difficulty finding things to invest in. In fact, one of the things I imagine will happen is you'll really struggle to screen out things. There'll be a huge range of really compelling local fisheries investments, lots of multiple benefit investments too that might take 20 years to realize the third, fourth and fifth benefit, but it's at least enough in the first and second to get it started provided your investors are willing to stay in the course. So on innovation and the kind of opening up new frontiers for investment in conservation, score is very high. Yeah, okay, thanks. Tom, would you like to add any further recommendations or advice to the picture? Well, I think this is really just advice if it has any value about pitch. I'm now treating myself as someone who's listening to a lot of pitches during the day. And so what stands out? I guess the things that stood out from, and I did read the white paper, question of diligence. I mean, basically the fund is described as covering minerals, fishing, commerce, trade and health. Okay, now I start to wonder about how it is that such a wide range of activities united by the fact that they happen on the liquid surface of this planet has enough in common that I can expect the diligence to be affected in sorting out projects that are investable. The second thing, this may be my mistake, but it's what I heard. I used to find when I first started doing this a long time ago, I would get, once we solicited, a lot of proposals in the early days of climate change. And they would come in and they would say, here's a project that we would like you to offer some sort of exceptionally publicly conscious investment for, I don't know what to call impact, whatever it is. And it's got a 325% internal rate of return. My reaction was always the same thing, which was, here, let me recommend a list of banks to you and go out, 325%. That's terrific. But if you combine that with things like first loss and strange forms of particularly risky cover, it's hard to figure out how they come together. So what I think is needed is some sense of, I think at one point it was said, this sustainable shellfish operation, according to EDF or someone else who was cited is three times as valuable as non-sustainable activities. I mean, that sounds great to me. Go out and do it, if that's the case. And usually there's something else that has to be there in that story. Maybe it comes back to some of the things that James was mentioning. Is there some policy change or some legal change that has to occur that enables this three times production that is proper here? And then if that is the case, then the real risk gets associated with either the passage, the establishment of that, or the risks associated with its enforcement and gaming. So I think those are very important things to have at least in your pocket and understand that experienced investors are going to go there. In this particular case, I may be pointed in that direction because there have been fantastic schemes in the southern part of the Marta Cortez having to do with fishing, sustainable fishing, limited fishing. And they completely fell apart because of corruption in the allocation of the licenses. And so treat the risks openly and that's my only suggestion. Okay, that's a very valuable one. Thank you very much. Thank you to the jurors and thank you, David. I hope you can address some of the points during the breakout. Okay, now we're going to move on to our third pitch, which is brought to us by Oliver Hanco from Nature Bank. This is a local investment opportunity in cocoa growing in the Dominican Republic. It is private equity driven. So it might be interesting to some of the finance professionals and experts in the room today. Oliver, why should we invest in cocoa in the Dominican Republic? The floor is yours. Thank you very much. Yes, I think it's a bit different to what we heard before. It is, as you said, it's a single commodity strategy. It's a single market. So we've got a very different risk profile here. And obviously, maybe also a bit more bottom up than what we've heard before. However, it is a scalable initiative and something that is building on a year worth of detailed research in the Dominican Republic by our group. As Nature Bank may be a fairly new setup, I may use a couple of my seconds to introduce it, just so you understand what we're doing. Well, basically, it's a Canadian group that is a group of sustainable commodity experts with a setup in Canada, United States, Germany, and, well, I'm based in Switzerland. Essentially, we're producing sustainable commodities. Here, we're talking about cocoa. But we also have expertise, substantial expertise, as project developers, particularly in the field of carbon forestry and the field of sustainable biomass, and of course, in cocoa. So we originate projects, we finance them, we develop them, and they may be greenfield projects, they may be brownfield projects. So I don't know if you can actually see this. Just to basically show, this is an amalgamation of different organizations that have come together last year. And we've got project expertise all over the world. What you'll realize though is we have a strong focus on Central America and northern parts of South America. Jumping into it. Holistic approach to cocoa, that's important obviously because we're not, the investment case is about investing into the entire cocoa production value chain. So what our in-house consultancy can offer is a strong expertise on doing exactly that. Basically, from trade to grave, from bean to bar, producing cocoa and taking care not only of the growing part, but also of the fermenting, drying, the processing, the marketing. So the idea is to go as direct as possible, establish off-take agreements directly with, in this case, European, organic, and sustainable certified chocolate manufacturers, and basically build a strong, reliable, and direct value chain in the Dominican Republic. Now, I really like this chart. It's, I'm not sure if you can read it, but it shows the value generation. I mean, the cocoa-related chocolate markets or manufacturing markets get about a worth of 100 billion US dollars, as per now. Now, much of that, the bulk is what you see down there is prices that currently fetch about $3,000 per ton, metric ton. There are substantial premium being paid for cocoa, either because of certification or because of quality, flavor, basically. So, and as you can see here, the prices range from, as I said, $3,000, even up to $10,000 plus per ton. Now, these are really specialty, single origin, high flavor cocoa, or rarities rather. What we focus on is the finer flavor market, the certified finer flavor market, which you can see in this middle bracket, aiming at prices of $3,000 to maybe $5,000 per ton. Right, jumping on. The organic food market. Why is it important in this context? The Dominican Republic, in the grander scheme of things, is a tiny market, a tiny producer market, as I think 70 or more percent of the world cocoa production comes from Western Africa. However, it is by a number of, because of a number of reasons I'm not going to explain, the world need an organic cocoa production. And again, this is just an example, but generally speaking, organic food consumption is by and far outgoing general food market trends. So, this is an example, I just realized I picked a slightly older chart, but anyway, it just continues like that. A constant annual growth rate of 13.70 percent to an overall value of 35, as it is for 2015, 35 billion of value of the organic food market in the U.S. Now, the overall food market in the U.S. grows by 3 percent, and the same ratio more or less can be applied to cocoa. What you see is growth rates of more than 20 percent compared to two percent or two and a half percent actually of the overall market. Now, why the Dominican Republic? The Dominican Republic is a special place. It obviously is an established cocoa growing market. It's about 40,000 small holders active in that particular market. It's a population of about 10 million. It is a big island, but a small market, very well established infrastructure. From no point, you have more than two or three hours to the next port. The logistics are very important in cocoa processing and production. So there are, it's an agricultural market which has got its problems. It showed substantial growth as one of the strongest growing markets in the region. However, there still is prevailing poverty and in particular the cocoa market, as I said, 40,000 growers have been coming from traditionally a market producing very poor quality, driven by recent innovation over the last couple of years to becoming a producer of quality certified and organic cocoa, but there still can be done much more. Now, our objective is to develop up to 3,000, possibly even 5,000 hectares of cocoa plantation, certified parts of it, organic certified cocoa production. As I said, we focus on finer flavor cocoa. That equates to an overall value of US$100 million to US$150 million. All of it, as I said, direct investment, private equity. That's not, we're not shy of debt financing, so if you want to offer that to us, it's all good, but that is the focus. The typical, the objective is to establish a leading cocoa company locally, which will coordinate a number of different investments all over the island, becoming lighthouse projects for the surrounding, basically offering an outgrow concept for the surrounding small-holder farmers, offering superior high-yielding seeding, grafting material, planting material essentially, offering centralized, modern processing facilities. As I said, much of the quality is derived in the cocoa as part of the processing process. And ultimately also offering the marketing and exporting, sorry, marketing and exporting to the projects associated with this initiative. We have established and secured the all-important seed investment, which allows us to secure established high-quality, high-yielding top-performing thinkers that will act as lighthouse, basically allowing us to grow, develop new project areas. Right, just quickly. This is what a typical cocoa cash flow looks like. Now, cocoa is great, if you look at the back end. It yields stably, once fully productive in yields for more than 30 years, and if you rejuvenate it well and in time, you can continue to produce a very high productivity for a very long time, and you see your annual returns of maybe about 20%, and these are conservative inputs, that's all it's done. However, you do also see the problem which is, as with many perennial crops, the long lead time until you actually generate returns. So, obviously, a bit of intelligent engineering is required here. Now, here I've only been presenting the direct project finance investment case. NatureBank is listed at the Toronto Stock Exchange, Venture Exchange, and seeks to establish itself as a land developer, developing the projects up to operational maturity, so in order to make the case more attractive to financial investors A, and B, the plan is to develop a dedicated cocoa fund which will be diversified across several jurisdictions, so not only the Dominican Republic addressing, obviously, a number of issues around diversification, that will buy into the latter more, let's say, annuity-oriented cash flow properties of cocoa. Now, there's many more things to be said, which I won't, so thank you. Thank you very much. So, James, back to the return evaluation question. Yes, so thank you very much, Oliver. Much depends on what the investment is in. I mean, it's clear that there are accessible rates of return that can be understood in the growing of the commodity, and it's clear that there are companies that do both growing and marketing of the commodity, and you could track their performance as a stock investment, even on the private markets, you'll be able to find data on who's doing well, producing and marketing a product. But I'm also very curious in what you've finished up with, namely, in the end, am I investing in Nature Bank so that it can provide a facility that enables more investments of this particular type to be made, so. Okay, all right. Because that makes a big difference, and also it completely transforms my view of the nature of investment, am I making a project investment, am I making, you know, so you've got the point. And I think you'll need to be very clear about that when you go out to an investor base, because of course the ecosystem is very varied, and some will be interested in the listed Nature Bank investment and some will be interested in the emerging market project investment. All this, a smaller group will be interested in that, and you'll need to know very carefully who you're pitching to. So, but of course it is interesting to imagine a sustainable agriculture business being invested in that could take responsibility for the whole supply chain, and therefore set standards for others, but it's a good story over a period of time, so that we feel more confident that we can marry investments that are designed to produce, for example, increased yield, and those who look after soil and other aspects of the ecosystem that produce the value in the product, the ultimate product, and that more of the value can be retained in the corporate entity that can look after the interests of a smallholder that they have a commercial relationship with all the way through to the consumer that's buying it in a market where there's a very substantial markup as your graph shows. So, I'd like to imagine that it's possible to build those kinds of enterprises with the right kind of capital, and so it's attractive to me that you're having a go, but it also does need to be made really plain that it's Nature Bank principle that is going to carry a variety of investments rather than a single estate if you like. Okay, thanks, James. Tom, I'll turn myself to you. How would you rate the uniqueness of the proposal? That's a hard question, in the sense that there are many proposals that I've seen that come to deal with a particular problem that I will describe in a second as more generic, but they're not really generic because they have geographical and agronomic propositions and they are often very much related to the history of particular industrial organization or production patterns. So, this is a tailored project with a tailored instrument within a class of investments that are propping up, forgive the term, across the world in many different fields, coffee and Nicaragua, whatever. The generic issue as far as I can see it is that there are quality dimensions to this market that can produce higher returns, but apparently the dominant form is not in agribusinesses who are taking advantage of this at the present time because you couldn't do that. You could buy the land, rent the land and run an agribusiness. It seems to me that what you are after here is a particular production model having to do with small holders and help growers. And so, the problem or the interesting part of this investment is particularly the maintenance or the propagation of that particular pattern of industrial organization because it has sustainability elements certainly in terms of income distribution. And what we have is apparently we have an industrial form that would demand training, replanting, periods, looking at the income flow in which the negative, the income is negative for the small holders to do it themselves. They may not be credit worthy. And so looking for a form that can take advantage of the economies of scale apparently needed and retraining to get into the higher quality part of the markets and yet to do that in the way that preserves the agricultural investment. Very, very similar in some ways to the terms in Brazil in the 80s in coffee where they mixed everything through a marketing board, then realized there were huge gains to separating the crop quality and manage that essentially through a government entity. You're planning to do it on the private side. I think it's really quite interesting and I think we'd have to look with some care at the capital, the reasons for capital constraints on doing it directly without gross and then trying to mitigate those capital constraints by putting an intermediary organization and at scale. I find it interesting and I assume that in more detail those questions would be answered. Okay. Thank you. Elvira, final word of recommendation to Oliver Hanke. Given that he's German, I can be a little tougher. I'm representing a PE fund model. I had the benefit of chatting with him before, so what I think we would gain from is to understand better where actually your comparative advantage is versus others. If it is this easy and this is really easy in comparison to everything else everybody here deals with, why has it then not been done yet? So I think the clarity on what is it? Is it a point in time because certain things have fallen into place? Is it this combination of local partners you've found your expertise, where exactly is the momentum, why this, why now, why there? And what I also would want to really understand is what is happening to that land, to the small holders right now? What is it that actually you are replacing? What is it you are doing better? Is this a substantially higher standard you are introducing or are you crowding out something else? Which I don't think you are, but it was just not explained. So I think all of these aspects of where are you fearing on the scale of good environmental and social aspects? Where exactly come your certification standards in through the entire value chain or just for the high end products? What is in it for the community in this case? What can you do to enhance your landscape impact? This isn't the first thing that you've been thinking of. You've been thinking of good sustainable cocoa production but I think this group of stakeholders would be really interested to understand how does it actually tie into this impact world? You focused I think for a good reason to also distinguish yourself from previous pitches. You've focused a lot on marketability, operability, financial performance, returns and I think you've got a very strong case there. But how to embed it in all of the problems that we do know exist in the Dominican Republic? How much integrity does the whole value chain have that you are presenting? That these would be my questions. Thank you. Well, thank you all and we will be shortly breaking out and so you can choose your preferred investment case and dig deeper in the specific aspects of it. But before I let our jurors go, I would like to ask two final questions to each of you. So if you could invest your money only in one case, which one would it be? And secondly, what would you expect from the others to make you change your mind? So I think that's a fair way of bringing your final opinion. Tom, you were sitting closest. It's the theory of sitting in the back of the room that I experienced in most of my teaching life. I should have said elsewhere. No, I think in the end, probably because of the issues that were raised on funds, I would have a greater tendency to look carefully at the cuckoo arrangements. But I would look carefully because this question essentially of how a firm that has scale capacity can actually monitor and deal with the political risks of outgrowers is one that has a long history of difficulty, right? It's different, you have outgrowers or co-ops. These are very different structures and outgrowers in a number of places have presented particular problems and that's where I think the special advantages that Avira referred to would have to be demonstrated. That said, you wanna know what these guys would have to do? Yeah, what could make you change your mind yet? Exactly. Is there anything that could make you change your mind? Take a more genuine position to me with their money in this arrangement. It usually has a pretty good impact. Thank you. All right, so I'd like to think of three things in combination that would determine which way my money would go. First, I want to evaluate the idea. Just at the level of ideas, is it an idea that I think is going to have a chance of solving a systemic problem? Is it something I'm excited about just at the level of ideas? The second thing is people. Are the people concerned, capable of implementing the idea, taking the idea, turning to something that works in the material world? Can they apply it to the real-life situations that they face wherever they are, whatever they're doing, so ideas plus people? And the third thing is, do they have sufficient appreciation of luck? Because it's a fundamental component of every success story and every unsuccessful story. Can you cope with luck? There's a fantasy associated with IRRs. That the notion that somehow all of these are controllable risks and there's a number attached to it, definitely do not apply in these sorts of investments. So I want to know, do you appreciate luck? Are you lucky? Then I think that's where my money will go. So, because I have to... Yes. I'm going to go for... Even though actually I do like all of them, I'm going to go for the one that I think is most innovative, because I have a tendency that way. And so I'm going to go for the Althelia seascapes one, with a very strong recommendation to practice saying no, because you're going to get an awful lot of things that you're particularly, you're very good and well-meaning board members from the NGO community are going to say, we must do that, because it's very good. But you're going to have to practice saying no, because you're going to get a lot of things that we're not going to work. But so I'm going to go for innovation and put my knee there. And the other two quite easily convinced me. I'm actually very interested in the sustainable agriculture corporation model, where one could make an investment in a private company today, or maybe one that is already listed and have diversified risk over a number of assets over a period of years, and have that attract talent over time in the sustainability of agriculture. So I actually really like those sorts of investments. And actually, I think these guys will be fine. I think they've got a competent team and they'll raise their money and may not get a billion right away, but I think in due course, they'll build something that can be scaled. And so I'll keep in touch with them. Okay, good, thanks. Okay, I'll be brief. It has been a long day and you still want to get through the pitches. So if the land degradation neutrality fund can prove that it can neutralize land degradation, I'm in, but that verdict for me is still out. If the COCO project can really deliver a very, very high impact and be very sound on the E&S metals, and can put a lot of smart capital to really an optimal, not only good use, but an optimal use that really makes it worthwhile that I'm in. But for now, I'm slightly biased because finance and motion has recently invested in an aquaculture fund. So we're very familiar with the topic. I think a lot of lessons will still have to be learned by this team, but I think it really, the seascape issue is a very, very important one and it takes very committed people. So currently my favorite would be the seascape fund. Thank you everybody. So constructing an attractive value proposition can be a challenging and a long process. I think selling it to a broader community is even more difficult. And we often heard that impact investing is like giving your money away to a good cause. But I think that today we've heard from the three investment cases that the impact and economic viability of projects as well as financial return, they can go hand in hand. And I think all three of you have convinced us of that. So again, thank you very much. And also thank you very much to the jury for guiding us with your professionalism.