On Wednesday November 13th, the Centre for Development Innovation, Wageningen UR (CDI) will organize an international seminar to discuss public-private partnerships and the potential role they play in improving beneficial market access for smallholder farmers.
The central question to consider is: “Do PPPs effectively stimulate new market linkages that benefit low-income farmers, or do they just subsidise business as usual?”
Context
The question of how to feed a rapidly rising world population, together with how to defeat hunger for almost 900 million people, has reignited interest in agriculture. Given that 500 million small farms in developing countries are currently supporting almost two billion people, the promise of large-scale poverty reduction through sustainable development of smallholder agriculture has been central to this interest. Increasingly, public and private collaboration is seen by the international community as an essential mechanism for sustainable development of smallholder agriculture. A growing number of such collaborations, in the form of Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) is the result.
For example, OECD-DAC members have enlarged their spending on PPP mechanisms from US$234m in 2007 to US$903m in 2010 (not all on agriculture). Recent initiatives on public-private funding on smallholder agriculture include the G8’s ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’ and the WEF’s ‘New Vision on Agriculture’.
Enough anecdotal evidence suggests private-public collaboration in agriculture can reduce poverty and have a multiplier effect for all the stakeholders involved.
However, there is increasing concern that while PPP initiatives bring investment, they struggle to deliver beyond ‘business as usual’, rarely bring benefits to the majority of small producers (including women) and are not effectively held accountable to their poverty reduction goals.
Three guest speakers from different backgrounds present their experiences and vision on this topic. These keynote speeches will lead to an interactive discussion with the audience, in which different statements and points of view will be addressed.