Africa: Improving Food Security Requires the Upscaling of Public Private Partnerships (ppps)

OPINION

Mistrust between public and private actors needs to end to implement successful PPPs.

"Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) - a very fashionable buzzword - can play a critical role in food security but turning them into an effective operational approach is another story. There is still a lot of mistrust between public and private actors. PPPs that are successful in both local and foreign settings, as well as small and large private operators, are not easily developed and implemented," says Francesco Rampa, the head of Food Security for the European Centre for Development Policy Management (ECDPM).

He added: "Improving food and nutrition security worldwide, and in particular transforming agriculture in Africa, requires not only more effective and consistent policies and investments, but also the scaling up of inclusive multi-stakeholder partnerships."

In Africa, tensions are increasing between African smallholders - who believe producing organic food via multi-cropping is the solution for better food and nutrition security - and foreign companies - who tend to believe only large-scale mono-cropping can produce enough food, with fortification providing the supplements for improving nutrition, if or where needed;" he continues.

"Also questionable is whether most PPPs are commercially sustainable, with most examples of PPPs in African agriculture being pilots, strongly motivated by corporate social responsibility, and whether these models can be upscaled to serve base-of-the-pyramid consumers in a profitable and sustainable way. Finally, there are growing concerns about the risk that donors' initiatives to involve investors from their own countries in African agriculture PPPs are used as self-interested economic diplomacy at the expense of sustainable development objectives and local private sector growth.

Source: Allafrica.com