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Improving the livelihood of smallholder farmers
Public-private partnerships in agriculture:
Teamwork achieves many goals
The Foundation’s overarching goals are food security for all, sustainability, and agricultural transformation that helps close the gap between rural and urban incomes. Achieving these goals requires ‘enablers’ of many kinds, usually only made possible by partnerships.
The aim is to use complementary assets to maximum advantage; the challenge lies in alignment. Partners must agree objectives, roles, responsibilities and incentives. They also need jointly to protect and benefit from intellectual property, and work towards a unified vision of enhanced farm productivity.
Public investment in productivity-enhancing agricultural R&D has been declining for some time in most of the world outside China. Private investments and capability, on the other hand, continue to grow. These trends open up the need and opportunities for R&D partnerships that pool assets to farmers' benefit . The public sector provides strength in crop improvement; private organizations contribute expertise in plant sciences, genomics, bioinformatics and the marketing and delivery of products and services.
The Foundation builds partnerships worldwide
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are essential for advancing agriculture to meet global challenges in food security. They help widen access to technology and link farmers to markets. By combining strengths, the partners can all make better progress than on their own. The Foundation is involved in a wide range of such partnerships.
PPPs can take many forms, and have a wide range of goals. In 2009, the Syngenta Foundation hosted a workshop in Switzerland, to examine PPPs in agricultural R&D. The meeting brought together representatives of the CGIAR*, the private sector, academia, NGOs and donors. They discussed principles of how to craft R&D collaborations; key topics included product stewardship and liability, as well as intellectual property.
The Foundation continues to develop new PPPs, with the aim of providing solutions along the entire agricultural value chain. For example, we have recently initiated a partnership to improve disease resistance in wheat . Syngenta scientists in France and the USA work directly here with colleagues at CIMMYT** in Mexico. They will make their data available to researchers in the public and private sectors. Further examples of R&D PPPs are the HarvestPlus multi-crop biofortification initiative and our Ethiopian tef project.
Cooperation in practice
Partnerships also form the basis of the Foundation’s extension projects in many parts of the world. Our program in India provides several good examples. There, thousands of smallholders have already benefited from improved access to knowledge and technology, delivered through diversified extension strategies. The PPPs providing advisory services involve the government, universities, NGOs and commercial partners. The spread of knowledge is achieved through farmer workshops, village-level interactions and technology demonstrations in the farmers’ own fields. Major scale-up of these projects is now underway.
PPPs cover a wide range of further areas. As well as R&D or extension services, the Foundation’s partnerships also include an index insurance initiative in Kenya. This aims to develop agricultural micro-insurance that will help smallholders mitigate weather risks, thereby enabling them to invest in fertilizer and other productivity-enhancing inputs.
Another crucial focus of PPPs is improved smallholder access to markets for their produce. A recent addition to our partnership portfolio aims to establish an integrated supply chain for high-quality vegetables in the Peruvian Andes. The partners here include an NGO and Arcos Dorados, who run McDonald’s operations in Latin America.
Successful agricultural PPPs should all lead to ‘win-win situations’ that benefit farmers. Many key lessons are emerging from the Syngenta Foundation’s work in this area. Among them is the importance of due diligence to bring together the right partners, create complementary incentives, agree on the terms and conditions, and lay down clear responsibilities.
Do you have a question about public-private partnerships in agriculture? Ask the Syngenta Foundation here.
* Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research
** Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center).
** Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center).
