Opinion > NEWCONOMICS > Private sector, Newconomics and agriculture development.

Over the last years growing consensus was built around the idea that unsustainable food systems must be transformed to become more sustainable. Lots of efforts were devoted to such endeavour. However, more and faster needs to be done to ensure meaningful and relevant transformation takes place in a timely manner, as discuss in a recent webinar organized by the World Agriculture Forum.

Governments, international organizations, the private sector and other relevant stakeholders needs to improve its cooperation, better integrate its efforts and constantly update its approaches to build sustainable food systems. They also need to make viable and visible contributions to common targets. And it have to do so while dealing with significant pressures on national budgets and public finances.

At the same time, food systems are facing increasing numbers of plant and animal pests and diseases, including zoonoses, emerging threats such as antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and climate shocks, which require new research, innovation and collaboration.

The private sector has been key to achieve the transformation of the food systems around the world. Such role could only grow in the future. Governments and multilateral organizations must play a catalytic role to revise and develop innovative mechanisms for private sector partnerships.

We know those mechanisms well and have tested it in the past. We need to keep updating and improving them to get the best possible results. Among them we have prominente tools, like the following:

1. Policy dialogue for capacity building; leveraging the unique viewpoint brought by private sector companies, entrepreneurs and executives to treat complex productive and development challenges. This includes advocacy; to share and disseminate information and best practices.
2. Knowledge and research dissemination; on market trends and emerging technologies, including data sharing and developing mechanisms to strengthen innovation along the value chain.
3. Resources mobilization for technical cooperation; supporting capacity building through concrete and practical cases on the ground and providing a clear exit strategy to secure technical cooperation is temporal and beneficiaries could take off by themselves when programs are complete.
4. Support for finance and investment mobilization; catalyzing, blending, leveraging and structuring sources of domestic and international resources to foster production and development.

All these mechanisms need multi-stakeholders dialogue, that cannot be properly developed without the participation of the private sector.

A clear and focus agenda could be of the essence to secure an effective and meaningful dialogue.

Such agenda could place food systems as the key entry points for capitalizing on interlinkages and accelerating progress to ensure better production, nutrition, health, environment and livelihoods. Small farm holders should be place at the center of the agenda.

Scaling up science, technology and innovation should also be made key. As explained in many research reports and documents, harnessing it is crucial for a profound transformation of food and agricultural systems.

Equally important would be to capitalize on data, non-traditional data sources and data science, in order to secure the development of platforms able to integrate multi sectoral data from various sources for real-time analysis and forecasting.

A very important issue for the agenda of private sector partnerships should be that of mobilizing investments, more and better, as a way to scale up capacity building of technical expertise and the institutional development needed to develop hard and soft infrastructure. The latter include issues ranging form infrastructure development to the institutions and capacities needed to comply with standards and sanitary and phytosanitary rules and regulations.

While gathering the mechanisms around an agenda for private sector partnerships we will still need to develop a proper framework for action. Usually those frameworks should address three different phases: the design, implementation and the finals phase of scaling up successful programs and experiences.

Usually we would need to engage influential champions across stakeholders groups (government, private sector, academia, etc), align a set of shared goals and structure the collaborative mechanisms to complete de design phase.

The implementation phase would drive us to define specific goals and implement action plans on case by case basis, a advancing milestones to drive progress.

Finally, we scale and institutionalize proven models, adapting lessons and innovations and reviewing partnership structures as needed to address new cases.

These frameworks for action would ensure private sector partnerships are locally-owned and align with country goals as well as market-driven, with projects rooted in viable business cases, integrating full value chains that benefit all actors in the agriculture system, not only including small farm holders but also given them a key role whenever possible.

More and better needs to be than. And soon enough.