Public- private collaborations symposia welcome remarks

My brief this morning is to provide an NGO perspective on the challenges and potential for innovative collaborations between public and private concerns in achieving sustainable development.

In order to address this topic, I propose to

• Provide some preliminary comments that might set the context within which this conversation about collaboration is taking place.
  
  
• Offer some comments on the challenges that derive from that context
  
  
• Present some principles for successful partnership
  
  
• Examine some of the pitfalls that have in the past, impeded success in achieving meaningful partnership or collaboration.
  
  
• Close with a few questions and musings about future direction.

So what is going on in the broader social and political context that will shape the potential for the kinds of collaboration between public and private sector actors envisioned by the Syngenta Foundation?

• We are witnessing a growing debate about globalization and its impact on equity and equality around the world.
  
  
• On the one side, there is a pro-globalization and free-trade camp: They would hold that the free market principles are sacrosanct, markets must open, tariffs must drop, inflation must be managed, capital flows must move unimpeded, corruption must be dealt with, fiscal discipline and respect for private property must be made paramount national priorities, if not human rights.
  
  
• On the other, an anti-globalization camp: They would review the same evidence and objective reality and conclude that poverty and suffering is growing, markets are manipulated by private interest and are only free in developing countries, the World Bank and IMF are handmaidens of narrow special interests and their policies must be resisted and finally, trade is antithetical to development.
  
  
• We are living a "Tragedy of Polarization": We are all stuck with nowhere to go. Thomas Friedmann calls the anti-globalizers "the enemies of the poor". The anti-globalizers villainize corporate power, every opportunity they can get. It's hard to find a middle ground for fact-based dialogue.
  
  
• In response to this social and political impasse, we see the emergence of a global social movement with a broad social base that is organizing to resist policies and practices of global private capital. Some would refer to this as the emergence of transnational civil society. In the same way that corporations might move people, money, images, technology and information around the world in pursuit of profit, this new transnational civil society is utilizing these same organizational behaviors and tools in pursuit of equity and justice.
  
  
• Is this transnational civil society movement real? Yes. Is it organized and broad based? Yes. Is it gaining internal coherence and momentum? Yes. Is it likely to foster a broader debate about corporate accountability and ethical behavior that challenges corporate brands? Yes! Is it likely to present challenges to ideas about public and private sector collaboration and engagement? Absolutely.

So how does this debate on globalization intersect with public-private partnerships in agricultural research? I will convey some perspectives of NGOs first on the role of biotechnologies in the fight against hunger, and then on the privatization of research. However, it is important to keep in mind that there is no uniform view being put forth by NGOs on these subjects.

Green Revolution breeding technologies have produced a miracle in the last four decades in that today's farmers are feeding almost twice as many people far better from virtually the same cropland base. 1.4B has in 1961 and 1.5B has in 1998. At the same time, crop prices have declined to the lowest levels in history, to the benefits of consumers who are able to eat better while spending less and less of their budget on food. So the scientific and breeding breakthroughs of the last 40 years have made some substantial impact in advancing food security. Sadly, however, hundreds of millions of people remain food insecure. What I propose to offer you now is the core analysis that many NGOs use to understand this paradox and how to address it:

• Poverty is defined in terms of social exclusion rather than absence of public goods-the traditional welfare perspective. At Oxfam, we believe that hunger is caused by poverty, and that poverty is in turn a consequence of the systemic exclusion of distinct social groups from the rights, resources, and opportunities to achieve their fullest potential. Lack of access to existing biotechnologies and paucity of research on technologies that are most relevant to poor communities are two manifestations of such exclusion. But there are many others, including lack of access to land entitlements, to credit, to marketing networks, and to infrastructure. Technology ought therefore not to be regarded as the solution - the solution is social change.
  
  
• Food security is a basic human right. States therefore must take necessary steps to assure that food security is not subject to market whim or manipulation. NGOs are increasingly seeing development from a rights-based perspective that focuses less on absence of public goods and more on the role of the state in assuring sustainable livelihoods for its citizens as the core of the social contract that legitimizes the state. That raises serious questions about the role of non-state actors in supporting or undermining the core understandings of the national social contract. NGOs are gradually recognizing the need to rethink the role of the state rather than oppose state power and to seek ways to strengthen state power relative to non-state actors so that appropriate regulatory frameworks are in place to protect citizens against market failure and asymmetries.
  
  
• Sustainable development starts with people and is about livelihood sustainability, not about purely economic growth and efficiency. What purpose have we served if we succeed in developing such a highly efficient agricultural sector that drives all those who live in rural areas and derive a dignified life from agriculture off their land and into urban areas where little productive opportunity await them? Might we be fostering significant social instability as the price of our blind pursuit of profits and growth? Is there a vision of a 21st century agriculture that can imagine large rural populations, enjoying a reasonable and dignified way of life? NGOs would like to believe there is such an alternative vision that has yet to be seriously pursued.
  
  
• Sustainable technology must take into account the real, not the imagined needs of small farmers. With regard to much of what is being experimented with as transgenic technologies, the lack of desirable traits in crops of significance to resource-poor people is a serious constraint. Poverty is often seen as justifying certain kinds of research yet the real root causes of the poverty in question may have nothing to do with a technological solution. And land productivity can in many cases be enhanced by proven, inexpensive, locally-controlled and environmentally-friendly technologies.
  
  
• Scientific hubris linked to the profit motive is a deadly brew. The Green Revolution in its earliest years was a program of plant breeders who seldom left their research stations and knew little about the farming systems they would seek to transform. There was much hubris driving the Green Revolution experience. Once the breeding was made more sensitive to context and farmer needs many of the early objections were allayed. NGOs doubt whether privatized agricultural research institutions will ever take the time to listen or care about their real issues or concerns as profit rules.

The bottom line for most NGOs is summarized in the view that, while technology may increase the total volume of production and reduce prices, to the benefit of urban consumers including the urban poor, it may leave the rural poor poorer if they are victimized by rapidly escalating input costs or simply driven off their land by competition of large estates and a broader consolidation and monopolization of the agricultural sector by large corporate farming units. The evidence that these are real concerns is as evident here in the US as they are in developing countries.

Moving now to NGO perspectives on the privatization of research, I would offer the following observations:

• Agricultural research is a global public good. For over 300 years, agricultural scientific knowledge has been in the public domain and essentially a global public good. As a consequence, we have seen very dynamic efforts at state-sponsored research and development. Technologies have moved around the world in very curious ways. Most amusing is the story of Thomas Jefferson, carrying rice seeds in the lining of his coat from Italy to the US to promote rice production in SC.
  
  
• Globalization, as Mary Robinson has stated, is for most NGOs about the privatization of political power. Privatization of knowledge in agricultural sector for NGOs is therefore a political, as much as it is an economic or legal issue.
  
  
• The TRIPs agreement is a hurdle for development. The TRIPs agreement seeks to establish, for the first time, a global system of minimum standards for protection and enforcement of intellectual property claims. NGOs have recognized that TRIPs has tremendous implications for development. While the intent to strike a balance between providing incentives to researchers for innovation and assuring the dissemination of their invention is fundamentally good, the task of striking the right balance between public and private interests has been fraught with difficulty since the inception of the idea among the Venetians. Throughout history, countries at the top of the technological ladder have generally sought to use intellectual property protection to prevent others from catching up. For Americans, it is interesting to note that Thomas Jefferson in signing this country's first patent law, explicitly rejected the application of patents to foreign inventions, as the US wanted to optimize its ability to grow through innovation and the use of technology and not pay exorbitantly to do so. Most of today's advanced industrial countries refused to grant patents through their formative stage of development and that several - notably France, Germany, Canada and Japan - did not provide patent protection until after 1960. The worry about TRIPs stems from the domination of rich countries of patented technologies and their control of global expenditure for R&D.
  
  
• Privatizing Community Knowledge. Developing countries account for an estimated 90 percent of the world's biological resources. This fact has created a surge in patent claims over the last decade as part of a corporate gold rush as companies seek to turn domination of research into domination of markets. In the US alone, patent applications are running at 300,000 per year, twice the number in 1990. In the US and Europe, patents are being awarded for products and formulas that are already known to farmers in developing countries, e.g. Basmati rice, Mexican Enola bean and selected maize genes. What this demonstrates is that resources may be extracted from public lands, farms and villages and subsequently patented in another country, in effect privatizing the benefits of community knowledge, handed down through generations. Extrapolating from this process, small farmers may paradoxically find themselves facing potential restrictions on the right to save, exchange and sell seeds that their ancestors had domesticated over hundreds of years. At present the needs of industry and agricultural progress are yet to be properly reconciled with the rights of indigenous peoples and poor farmers who maintained many of the landraces on which today's improved varieties depend.
  
  
• It is critical to Revitalize the State's Role in Agriculture. Over the last two decades, debt servicing and structural adjustment programs have resulted in slashed funding for agricultural research in developing countries. Much of the infrastructure of agricultural training colleges, research stations, agricultural extension, agrarian banks and national agricultural research services (NARS) have seen their access to foreign aid and multi-lateral lending curtailed as funders' priorities have shifted away from agriculture. In the late 1980's, the EU spent 12 percent of its aid budget on agriculture, as compared to only 4 percent in 1998. Similarly, World Bank lending for agriculture had declined from 26 percent in the early 1980's to 10 percent in 2000. Meanwhile the amount USAID directed toward agricultural research declined by 75 percent during this same period. Andrew Natsios, the current director of USAID, commented to me that in the 1980's there were over 50 agricultural economists at USAID, and now there are two. A rather profound statement of the level of importance accorded today to this critical sector.

NGOs have not been major proponents of state sponsored agricultural research and have in some cases operated their own agricultural research and extension programs focusing on needs of small and subsistence farmer agriculture. Nonetheless, there is a growing awareness among NGOs, that as the public sector and international donors have abandoned the agricultural sector, the plight of poor farm families is worsening. This prompts a reexamination of the role of state institutions in supporting research, credit, and extension activities.
Moreover, as these debates on biotechnology advance, it will be necessary that nations have strong NARS that can formulate policies adequate to the nation's circumstances to guide national research priorities and to interact with private research centers and agri-business. Such interactions may enable nations to foster productive partnerships that will permit for example the transfer of non-exclusive rights to certain patents to NARS with the purpose of developing technology for eco-regions and commodities of little interest to the patent holder. The estimated social returns to agricultural R&D are as good now as they ever were, high enough to justify even greater investment of public funds.

So with the backdrop of these challenges posed by the NGO sector to private commercial interests and philanthropy, what are the prospects for innovative collaboration and genuine partnership?

Unfortunately, the number and variety of such partnerships are few and far between as the researchers who have sought to monitor these trends have discovered. This should not be surprising as corporate philanthropy in US represents only 2 to 3 percent of overall giving in any year. Corporations have not historically seen these kinds of engagements as part of their mandate. Similarly, the non-profit sector has tended to only see corporate interests as a philanthropic cash cow. What is clear is that both of these characterizations are changing and there is much exploratory dialogue underway.

On the corporate side, one sees an explosion of interest in the issue of corporate responsibility and trust building. Indicative of such trends is the explosion of membership in such groups as Business for Social Responsibility whose annual meetings deal with a wide range of topics including human rights, environmental sustainability, and labor standards. One also observes the marketing of numerous dialogue fora led by major organizational change gurus like Peter Senge or Rosabeth Moss Kantor of Harvard Business School.

On the non-profit side, there has been a shortage of organizations ready to engage this new burst of energy from the private sector. There are diverse reasons for this. Many non-profits continue to view corporations as only sources of philanthropic giving. They are not staffed or equipped to engage with corporations on any other terms. Others have just decided that they have not got the time or resources to match what corporations can put into such programs so they simply steer clear of them. Other non-profits are wary of corporate interests and fear having their reputation sullied by becoming partner to a controversial initiative that serves the interest of the corporation but may have questionable social consequences.
On the bright side, others are taking steps to prepare for a more holistic engagement with the private sector and are preparing very detailed and elaborate corporate relations policies. These groups are assuming that they will increasingly deal with private sector interests in diverse arenas and must have clear policies for how to manage a whole continuum of relations that range from adversarial advocacy, to policy dialogue to philanthropy and a variety of unforeseen variations in between.

For many non-profits the principles of good partnership are well known and part of their institutional practice in their on-going work with fellow non-profits at home or in the developing world.

The key elements of good partnerships are:

• First, Transparent definition of each party's objectives and interests, and the specification of mutual accountability mechanisms, both of which must be underpinned by solid mutual trust. Mutual accountability presumes that there is a shared ownership of risks, benefits and responsibility for outcomes. To make this work requires an appropriate degree of shared governance.
  
  
• Second, It is critical that real partners work to weave a fabric of sustainability to the relationship. This involves finding the confluence of mission, vision and values between the partners that can give real vitality to the relationship. Acknowledging the interdependence of each partner promotes a sense of interconnectedness and shared responsibility.
  
  
• Third, partners must honor the range of resources each brings to the relationship even though they may vary in content and quantity. The perception of asymmetry in the power relations within the partnership can prove disastrous.
  
  
• Fourth, partnerships must be flexible. Partnering as a process is not static but dynamic, bending responsively as circumstances and opportunities require.
  
  
• Finally, all parties to a partnership should see partnering as a continuous learning process. Partnering is a relationship that invents itself as it goes along. Partners must bring a sense of inquiry, openness, curiosity, innovation and discovery to the partnership in order to keep it lively and thriving.

Since, at Oxfam, we believe that hunger and poverty are essentially social and political problems and not merely technological or economic ones, developing change-oriented partnerships requires a strong capacity to analyze political, economic, social, environmental, cultural and historical aspects of stakeholder relationships. We must understand the power dynamics and decide who and what will move the development process forward. Even seemingly technical biotechnology projects must be put into their socio-political contexts. We insist on asking such questions as:

• Why are conditions as they are?
  
• Who benefits by the status quo?
  
• What motivates stakeholders' decisions?
  
• Which stakeholders are working for change in ways that Oxfam agrees is constructive?
  
• Are there ways that Oxfam can complement, or add value to their efforts?
  
• Can we do this without creating dependency?
  
• What special skills, talents, and knowledge does Oxfam bring to the table?

In this regard, I was pleased to read your statement of objectives, which underscores several of the principles that we hold dear in the nonprofit development sector, such as:

• Identification of the problem by resource-poor people themselves
  
• Tailoring of solutions to local realities, including both ecological environments and social, political and cultural contexts
  
• Emphasis on ecological as well as economic sustainability
  
• Investment in "capacity building" of local communities to empower them to generate their own solutions

If the principles are so easily articulated, why aren't such partnerships more abundant?

The reality is that applying those principles is an every day challenge, fraught with potential pitfalls, serious ethical dilemmas and conflicts of interests. The very goal of private-public partnerships is to promote mutually beneficial solutions. But one needs to be really careful that conflicts of interests do not spoil development projects, particularly in the context of huge asymmetries of information and imbalances of power between poor farmers and multinational corporations that may overwhelm and obscure critically important intercultural differences.

To illustrate this point, I have come across a study made by the NGO GRAIN which documents the experience of the "International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-Biotech Acquisition" or ISAAA, which is a public-private partnership which your sister organization the Novartis Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture sponsors. Its mission is a laudable one: "to contribute to poverty alleviation in developing countries by increasing crop productivity and incomes, particularly among resource-poor farmers, and to bring about more sustainable agricultural development in a safer global environment." But its focus on transferring cutting-edge biotechnologies raises the concern of pushing an external agenda onto small farmers instead of listening to their needs and empowering them with tools they can control.

For example, one project involving Mosanto and a Mexican research center aimed at transferring a gene for resistance to three potato viruses in Mexico. The main target group was supposed to be small farmers. But in fact potatoes are mostly grown in large estates in Mexico! For small farmers that do grow potatoes, the viruses in question were not the most pressing problem and protection against them was not worth the cost of the new seeds. For the varieties of potatoes grown by small farmers, there was no formal seed market through which the new seeds could be distributed. Moreover, the state had abandoned all kinds of technological assistance to small farmers. Expanding potato production also required heavy investment that the poor could not afford due to lack of access to credit. And NAFTA was likely to kill the market for potatoes grown by small farmers anyway.

So the project failed to reach small farmers, but did open the way for Mosanto to reach large estates. This kind of failure, due to insufficient homework on the part of the companies, explains the cynicism of many small farmers, which is relayed by millions of people through the so-called "anti-globalization" movement.

So where do we go from here?

For those of us in the NGO sector, we have recognized that for better or worse, the process of globalization is the default development paradigm of our era and that we had better find effective ways to deal with both its positive and negative dimensions.

As regards the future of agricultural research, we shall remain concerned and vigilant about the process of privatization of knowledge in the agricultural sector and its implication for food security. At this point in time, it is Oxfam's view that there is no reason to reject in advance and out of hand the potential that biotechnology may have for enhancing the welfare of the poor.

Our larger concern is that the motor driving biotechnological research and impetus for patenting are disconnected from the initiatives to reduce global poverty. Control over biotechnological research has become heavily concentrated in transnational corporations. And it is not lost on us that commercial companies are gearing their research, understandably, towards products likely to increase their profit margins and share values e.g. Monsanto patents on Roundup Ready crops.

Apart from the implications of such concentration on market control and pricing, we are also concerned about the extension of corporate control over seeds and its implications for biodiversity. Rapid increases in acreage planted with genetically modified varieties of crops could push traditional varieties out of the market with potentially serious consequences for future resistance to disease. Unfortunately, the TRIPS agreement as currently composed mounts a serious challenge to the sovereign right of governments to protect biodiversity under the UN Convention on Biological Diversity that affords governments well-defined rights over their biological resources.

With regard to the kinds of public and private partnerships envisioned by the Syngenta Foundation, Oxfam would see as a positive development. Nonetheless, what will matter to most NGOs at the end of the day is what is the agenda driving the philanthropic intent. Is it a real concern for the welfare of the poor? Or is it about market share and share value? We understand that for corporations, it is difficult to disentangle these two sets of goals, and market share often dominates. Corporate foundations are not profit centers and funding is cut when share value declines. We have lived this reality before so we are wary.

What the world really requires is a bigger vision that reaches beyond the simple transactional logic of the market place and seeks to harness the social, economic and political capital and imaginations in both the private and public sectors toward building a future that addresses the real causes of poverty and injustice, that assures sustainable livelihoods and dignity of workers and agriculturalists and their families and that invests in the long-term environmental sustainability of the planet.

I can assure you that a commitment to such a vision as the basis for partnership will win the hearts and minds of millions of citizens and organizations around the world and foster an abundance of partnerships. I congratulate the leadership of the Syngenta Foundation for taking initial steps in this direction and providing important leadership within their industry toward building such a vision. We only hope that others will follow and commit themselves to similar experiences in dialogue and learning.

Thank you very much.