Shared public and private action is considered by many to be a critical part of the solution in figuring out how to feed a rapidly rising world population, together with how to defeat hunger for almost 900 million people. The donor community is trying to leverage ever increasing private investments with sizeable public pots of money for agricultural development.

For OECD DAC members, spending through PPP mechanisms has risen from US$234m in 2007 to US$903m in 2010, but not all on agriculture.[1] Another examples is the G8’s ‘New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition’ with a commitment of over US$ 3 billion of private investment.

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 or women and are not effectively held accountable to their poverty reduction goals.

This leads to the need to analyse

(1) the effectiveness of using public funding to leverage private investment in agricultural development for poverty reduction and food security; and

(2) the accountability of private-public relationships in agriculture to their development goals and to the communities that they are designed to help.

IIED, CDI and Oxfam are currently putting together an action-oriented research programme to tackle these questions.

Who needs it?
All parties actively involved in funding and implementing public-private relationships for more inclusive agri-market development would benefit from this work. Government, donors and other actors will have a generic monitoring framework and recommended process to create transparency and accountability, that can adapted for new initiatives.

Goals
Our objective is to help ensure that private-public relationships in agriculture benefit poor smallholder farmers, especially women, whilst reducing large-scale land acquisitions without the free and prior consent of communities. We are tackling that through three pillars of work.

• Pillar 1 is about building the evidence base of how transparency and accountability in private-public relationships in agriculture are currently organised, and what they can bring to improve their impact on poverty reduction and sustainable development. It will deliver a baseline report on current approaches and publish an annual update on a specialist topic such as Transparency; Sustainability (models of agriculture); or Inclusion, particularly of women.

• Pillar 2 will demonstrate the effectiveness of improved transparency and accountability through influencing the strategic priorities of specific global or national private-public relationships. It will provide up to 5 innovation processes and the formation of up to 5 transparency and accountability mechanisms at national level.

• Pillar 3 will use the findings from the first two pillars to actively influence how donors and Government use public finance to leverage investment in agriculture to reduce poverty. A range of conferences and workshops will be joined or organised.

Timelines
We are currently pulling together the funding to get this body of work started. Optimistically a kick-off workshop in October 2013 would refine the methodology and focus locations. Pillar 1 would take 6-9 months to complete, with Pillar 2 another 2-3 years. Pillar 3 would run parallel to the others over four years.

• Sept – Dec 2013, scoping existing research and primary national research opportunities.

• Jan – June 2014, undertaking research and gaining mandate for innovation, accountability and transparency processes.

• July 2014 – July 2015, undertake up to 3 innovation processes and create on-going accountability and transparency mechanisms.

• July 2015 – July 2016, undertake up to 2 innovation processes and create on-going accountability and transparency mechanisms.

• July 2016 – July 2017, finish country work and complete learning and influencing work.