Private-public partnerships may deliver food security

Linda Mottram, Canberra

Last Updated: Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:17:00 +1100

Private-public partnerships and markets are the key to delivering food security for the world according to experts and multinational food companies at a conference in Canberra.

It was a view that broadly dominated the annual international conference of The Crawford Fund, an Australian fund that encourages international agricultural research.

Representatives from multinational food companies and agricultural experts attended the conference.

One speaker, the executive director of the Syngenta corporation's Foundation for Sustainable Agriculture, Doctor Marco Feroni, told the conference, private spending had stepped up where public spending globally had stagnated.

He said while more needed to be done for the world's hundreds of millions of small farmers, it had been done before, successfully, in partnership with government.

"This is how the Sahara and how Thailand's northeast developed, Thailand's northeast still being the domain of small holders to this day," said Dr Feroni.

Doctor Ferroni says India's burgeoning seed market is an example of public private co-operation benefiting small farmers.

"The seed business really took off in India with the advent of private seed companies," he said.

"But private seed companies were able to emerge only because they could rely on two things...public germ plasma and... a pro-active, pro-business attitude on the part of both the national agricultural research system and international partners."

Examples of success

Development in Malawi, Rwanda and Tanzania has also been pointed out as cases of successful cooperation between private enterprises and the state.

A former senior UN official and current head of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, Doctor Namanga Ngongi, was at the conference.

He says governments alone cannot bring about the level of agricultural development required to feed the world.

He also says the advantages brought by scientific innovation should change the perception of the private sector's role.

"If you go from one tonne per hectare to four tonnes per hectare clearly you have gained three tonnes. The three tonnes you can sell to find the money to be able to buy the next seeds for the next year. Its an investment," he said.

Dissenting opinion

But agronomist Doctor Dyno Keatinge, who heads the World Vegetable Research and Development Centre in Taiwan, disagrees with these views.

He says the focus isn't right.

"Though I believe that the large scale private sector can feed the world it will not be able to nourish the world," he said.

He says malnutrition, not hunger, is the worlds biggest food problem, making fruit and vegetables just as important as the staple crops the bulk of private money is devoted to.

He says there's a risk those more minor crops will be marginalised by the focus on staples and the drive to hybridize crops.

Mr Keatinge says they'll be wider implications for the Pacific in particular.

"For broadacre agriculture, the private sector are obviously depending upon hybrid seeds. But for many of the crops that we're dealing with particular in lets say the Pacific islands, hybrids are not that appropriate," he said.

"If you want to enable small scale farmers to continue to use seed which you've given them year after year after year you have to go back to open pollinated and self-pollinated material."

Doctor Keatinge says the private sector has no interest in non-hybrids, which is where government's must step in on behalf of poor farmers.