Advancing Agricultural Innovation through Public-Private PartnershipsThe world’s farmers are challenged with growing abundant,safe and nutritious food for an increasing global populationin the face of changing climate and pest pressures. Toenable them to continue to produce food sustainably, theyneed to have broad access to appropriate innovations, as wellas the knowledge and skills to make these new tools valuableon the farm.

Public-private partnerships are a key mechanism to developand deliver a reliable stream of technology in the face ofchanging demands. Collaborative partnerships can effectivelybridge the gap between public and private sectors’ distinctivecompetencies in order to meet farmers’ needs.

For national governments, partnerships offer a way totranslate shared research outputs into useful, relevant toolsfor their own farmers. They can offer access to a greatervariety of technology choices; they can spread and share thefinancial burden of research; and they can create a flexible,expert resource for capacity-building.

For the private sector, public-private partnerships havepotential to increase the leverage of a deep knowledge-base.They offer a mechanism to share the costs of infrastructureand diffusion, and also an opportunity to increase theeffectiveness of technologies over time. Finally, they canmake individual innovations better adapted to localconditions, and in so doing enhance the quality and quantityof sectoral knowledge.

Effective partnerships can bridge public and private sectorcompetencies and interests. When they do so, they canmultiply both social and economic value. They can createfaster and more resilient innovation pipelines, enable efficienttechnology diffusion, support continuous improvement andpromote the effective and responsible application oftechnology.

Partnerships ShareFarming Knowledge

Public and private sector institutions both possess theknowledge needed to improve global agriculture. Collaborativeprojects are sharing practical agricultural information andcultivation of best practice among public and private sectororganisations and farmers. For example:

• Partnerships contribute to capacity building by increasingthe level of education on crop and natural resourcemanagement for farmers. Private companies have beeninvolved in the South African “Developing AgricultureProject,” which trains farmers how to increase andsafeguard crop yields through adapted agriculturalmanagement practices.

• CropLife International and its members have worked inmany regions in partnerships with governments and NGOsto provide training on the best agricultural practices andresponsible product usage. Several partnerships betweenNGOs have focused on integrated pest management (IPM)training and responsible product use in Latin America,Southeast Asia, and Africa. Other projects have includededucating academia, public and private researchers, andgovernment agencies on how to comply with guidelines forregulated field trials.

• Partnerships often act to directly combine expertise acrossborders, resulting in economies of scale and fasteradaptation. The HarvestPlus Challenge Program was co-convened by the International Centre for TropicalAgriculture (CIAT) and the International Food PolicyResearch Institute (IFPRI) and works with more than 200agricultural and nutrition scientists around the world,including private sector developers. The centre is currentlybiofortifying seven key staple crops that will have thegreatest impact in alleviating micronutrient malnutrition inAsia and Africa – beans, cassava, maize, pearl millet, rice,sweet potato, and wheat.

Public-Private PartnershipsPartnerships to build resourceaccess and reduce risk

Shared projects between the public and private sector andgovernment agencies can build fundamental resources sofarmers can manage their production process more reliably,at less cost and lower risk. For example:

• The AATF is a not-for-profit organisation designed tofacilitate and promote public-private partnerships aroundproprietary agricultural technologies for use by resource-poor smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa. TheFoundation offers a one-stop-shop that provides expertiseand know-how that facilitate the identification, access,development, delivery, and utilisation of proprietaryagricultural technologies. The AATF also manages theWater Efficient Maize for Africa (WEMA) project – apartnership between African public sector institutions andseveral private sector companies and foundations todevelop drought-tolerant African maize using conventionalbreeding, marker-assisted breeding, and biotechnology.

• Rural access to microfinance services is essential tofarmers. In India, private companies have worked to assistsome farmers to gain financial independence through theintroduction of low cost credit for farmers to purchasebiotech maize seed and inputs. The development of atransparent, reliable credit and distribution system hasprovided farmers with access to low-cost, high-yieldingcorn hybrids, farm inputs, and crop agronomic knowledge.

Partnerships thatPrioritise RelevantResearch Imperatives

Many public-private partnerships take the form ofcollaborative research projects, either leveraging private sectorinvestment in public research initiatives or conductingresearch into local varieties and landraces.

By helping to develop local varieties of important crops,partnerships ensure farmers in these countries benefit fromthe technological developments which have benefited cropselsewhere. For example:

• In some cases, private sector developers donate theirtechnology and research to local public institutions tofurther develop local crop varieties. In India, Bangladesh,and the Philippines, biotech brinjal (eggplant) technologywas donated directly to local researchers to help developnew crop varieties that are resistant to local pests, helpingspeed up farmers’ access to improved varieties.

• Many partnerships result directly in flexible financingarrangements. The African Agricultural Technology Fund(AATF) has worked with some of its private sector partnersto negotiate licensing agreements for proprietarytechnologies that allow royalty-free access and sharing ofthese technologies in order to improve farmer access. Theprojects cover a broad range of crops, focusing on some ofthe main staple foods such as maize and rice.

• Partnerships can also bring orphan crops within the scopeof research, benefiting disadvantaged communities.Researchers in the private sector teamed with theUniversity of Bern to maintain and improve yields of tef,the most important cereal crop in Ethiopia. Thecollaborative project includes sharing crop improvementand laboratory techniques. Tef is grown mostly in Ethiopia,and without public-private collaboration, giving sufficientresearch focus for tef would have been more difficult toachieve.

The private sector has been a major contributor to agriculturalresearch and development, funded through returns based oninnovative products that brought value to the public and forwhich intellectual property rights provided a reasonablemarket opportunity.

For improvements of local varieties to continue to meetgrowing challenges, there is an acute need for increasedfunding – both public and private – in agricultural research,and to leverage that funding through deeper and broadercollaborations between the public and private sectors andresearch communities. Equally important to enablingcollaborative projects and to supporting the introduction oftechnology is the need for scientific capacity, regulatoryframeworks, social and research infrastructures, and effectivelegal frameworks and institutions.

The public and private sectors play different roles and havedifferent abilities to bring to bear in the continuous cycle ofimprovement and innovation that is needed to ensure foodsecurity.

In the context of competing priorities and significant demandson governments to meet different goals, public-privatepartnerships create a means to build on the complementarycapacities of each sector.

Food security requires ongoing and continuous improvementsto the tools and techniques available to farmers. This involvesnot only the development of new technologies but theiradaptation and diffusion to local needs and conditions andtheir effective use by skilled and well-informed farmers.Neither the private nor the public sector can achieve theseaims alone.

• Sometimes partnerships directly target a social need. Amulti-national team of private and public sector scientistsis currently developing biotech bananas in Uganda withincreased vitamin A, vitamin E, and iron content. Bananais a major food crop in Uganda, so successful researchcould dramatically improve the diets of millions of people.

• Partnerships can adapt to the particular infrastructureneeds of a region. The BioCassava Plus project is focusedon improving the nutritional quality of cassava, the primarysource of calories for over 250 million people in Sub-Saharan Africa. Collaboration between public and privatesector researchers is focused on enhancing levels of zinc,iron, protein and vitamins, as well as improving post-harvest durability – vital given the poor quality of localstorage facilities.

• The Africa Biofortified Sorghum project is a public-privateconsortium that is developing a more nutritious and easilydigestible sorghum that contains increased levels of aminoacids, vitamins, iron, and zinc. The project, which relies oncapacity building and research knowledge from privatesector companies, could improve the health of 300 millionpeople by increasing sorghum’s nutritional quality.Sorghum is the fifth most important cereal crop, and themain dietary staple for more than 500 million peopleacross the developing world.

• Brazil’s public agricultural research corporation Embrapa,which is linked to the Ministry of Agriculture, has workedwith private sector companies that have supplied geneticinformation used in the development of an herbicide-tolerant biotech soybean that meets local growers’ specificneeds.

• There are numerous rice improvement programmesinvolving public and private sector researchers – fromimproving the nutritional content of rice, to conferringresistance to diseases and pests.

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Date of publication: December 2009