WASHINGTON — Even by the standards of a town used to summitry, this is a busy spring in Washington. This week, delegations from every corner of the globe are descending on the Foggy Bottom neighborhood for the World Bank and International Monetary Fund’s yearly spring meetings. Exactly a month later, leaders from the richest corners of the globe will be back in the region, headed to Camp David for the 2012 G8 Summit. With food security featuring on both agendas, now is the right time to get public-private partnerships working on solutions, and just plain working.

Food security and agriculture are enjoying a renaissance in international development after decades as second-rate causes among donors. When the G8 came together in 2009 in L’Aquila, Italy, its leaders pledged to commit $22 billion to fighting food insecurity among the world’s poorest. This battle against hunger, declared at the highest levels, is being fought both against long-term, structural food insecurity and against famines and other emergencies, like the one unfolding now in the Sahel, the area below the Sahara desert that stretches across the African continent.

Meanwhile, another neglected cause — donor partnerships with for-profit companies — has also become more prominent in the development community in recent years. The knock against public-private partnerships had been that the profit motive was incompatible with the nobler goals of easing human suffering and raising living standards. Only relatively recently have mainstream development thinkers begun to accept that the profit motive is, in fact, probably the surest way to guarantee sustained economic growth and development. What is needed most by developing countries, and the hungry people within them, is more business activity, particularly by companies (large or small) that grow, process, import, or otherwise sell food.

In some circumstances, humanitarian assistance, where food is given directly to starving people, is necessary. However, part of the key to eliminating those tragic scenarios is attacking the factors that allow them to recur. In the United States and Europe, farmers have the technology and infrastructure to mitigate bad weather or other supply shocks. Most Americans and Europeans have enough income to tolerate increased food prices. But across the developing world, most people are farmers working small plots of land with little to no modern technology, little to no market to sell surplus, and little to no income off the farm. Until a smallholder farmer can become a small business, or leave farming to make money elsewhere (perhaps in a different part of the agricultural supply chain) and thus buy food from others, this cycle continues. It is entrepreneurs and investors acting on the profit motive that break this cycle.

Unfortunately, in these difficult circumstances, investors are not going to go it alone. This is where donors come in: to mitigate risky investments by offering subsidized capital, employee training, or other inputs that change the cost-benefit calculation. From a donor perspective, this has the added value of catalyzing private funds for a multiplier effect — particularly appealing in a time of transatlantic budget austerity. Donors understand this — even in Europe, where skepticism of public-private collaboration has been more profound.

The problem, then, is not recognition. When statements are issued following these spring summits, they will sing the praises of public-private partnerships, and they will be sincere. However, when the proclamations reach the desks of those charged with implementing them, they get stuck. The reality is that the public and private sectors are two very different worlds. GMF convened a group of transatlantic experts to study food security partnerships in Africa and, in a report released today, the group found — after months of consultations in the United States, Europe, and Africa — that progress is impeded by the most basic of obstacles. Donors don’t know how to find or initiate conversations with interested businesses, and vice-versa. Once formed, partnerships often lack measurable goals, concrete steps, or a shared vocabulary. Partners often take on too much, rather than tackling specific, manageable challenges. Donors don’t understand or can’t deliver the flexibility that businesses need, driving them away with impractical rules or red tape. It is an unintentional disconnect between partners — not a lack of commitment — that prevents this crucial form of collaboration from taking root.

If transatlantic donors and businesses are ever going to get this right, now is certainly the time. The political will is established and widespread. Continuing budget austerity provides a compelling if unfortunate motivation for mobilizing private funds to fill the gaps. Ongoing food crises provide the moral imperative, and Africa’s coming demographic boom means that more businesses will want to tap those markets. This spring’s summits provide the platform for driving this home. Instead of spending time reaffirming high-level commitments, policymakers should take this opportunity to get down to basics.

Kate Ritterspach Thulin is a research assistant in the Economic Policy Program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington.

Image by USAID. 

By Mark Allegrini and Kate Ritterspach

This summer, the issue of food security in sub-Saharan Africa has been thrown into cruelly sharp focus. The United Nations reports that over 3 million Somalis (almost half the country’s population) are in need of food aid, and the U.S. Agency for International Development claims that over 12 million people in the eastern Horn of Africa are in need of immediate food, water or medical assistance. Last month the U.N. declared an official famine in two regions of Somalia, and recent U.S. statistics indicate that nearly 30,000 children under the age of five have already died.

Hunger in Africa is a daily reality for many across the continent, though it rarely makes headlines. The current situation in the Horn of Africa is, to be sure, a particularly dramatic case, with several of its own peculiarities. The current famine was triggered by a severe drought that affected the whole of eastern Africa. Somalia, where the official famine has been declared, is essentially a failed state, and long-standing armed conflict and militant control over some areas of the country exacerbate the effects of the drought and make delivery of essential food aid much more difficult.

However, some of the food crisis’ other contributing factors are more structural, and are not unique to one region or one dry season. Drought, while potentially devastating to farmers around the world, does not automatically produce food shortages or famine. But a basic and crippling problem in many parts of Africa is the lack of reliable, fully functioning food systems. This includes the lack of technology required to protect crops and maximize yields, and, just as crucially, the lack of infrastructure necessary to harvest, store, process, transport, and ship food locally, regionally, and internationally.

Since 2009, major donors have devoted significant attention and funds to agriculture and food security. Encouragingly, there is widespread recognition that real food security requires a holistic, value chain approach. Ultimately, for donors this means a shift away from business as usual, where large sums of money are allocated and spent largely by the donors themselves on isolated projects. The imperative of transatlantic budget austerity has added to the urgency of doing things differently. Donors must leverage the skills and financial resources of other donors, host countries, regional institutions, civil society and businesses. They can no longer go it alone.

Actually implementing this new approach, however, has proven to be a difficult task.  While high-level donor dialogues have produced commitments to coordination and a more holistic approach, there remain large gaps on the ground.  In many cases, donors’ focus on decreasing the number of countries and sectors receiving funds and attention for the sake of efficiency and specialization (“selectivity,” in the development vernacular) has not been accompanied by the necessary increase in coordination.  In order to achieve development goals in a time of smaller budgets and greater need, a focus on partnerships is a good place to start.

While one could characterize most donor programs as partnerships between the donor and host country, it has become essential to look beyond this traditional dyad toward ways to leverage other funding sources.  Generally speaking, the private sector is best suited to create economic growth. Functioning food systems are, of course, ultimately built and operated by business. Therefore, a key part of a donors’ role in ensuring food security should be helping to create a friendly and stable investment climate.  In the context of food security, donors need to bring in both the private sector and civil society to determine where investment can have the most catalytic effect. Once this is determined (for example, in Tanzania a study found that investments in food processing have a higher multiplier effect than those in any other sector), donors and businesses must come to an agreement about the right balance of resources and roles to make investments scalable and sustainable.

While partnerships with the private sector and coordination amongst donors are not new concepts, they have become increasingly important given today’s political and economic realities. To be successful, donors need to find better ways to coordinate and leverage existing sources of funding at all levels.  Country-led plans such as the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) and the Feed the Future Initiative represent a good first step toward this approach.  Coordinating directly with a country on its own priorities, as in CAADP, and having a clear set of goals and mechanisms, as outlined in the Feed the Future Initiative, create a transparent platform for high-level donor dialogues.  The United States and European Union have gone so far as to identify priority countries that will be the focus of increased efforts at coordination.  However, while much of this work has begun at the highest levels, these are two programs where change will require a renewed focus on ground-level action and partnerships.

There are many instances where ground-level focus has yielded real development results.  Much of the work left to be done lies in identifying, scaling, and duplicating the successes that have already been achieved while getting past those projects that have failed to achieve real results.  It is all too apparent that some partnerships exist more on paper than in reality, and in a time of increased constraints, donors should not shy away from distinguishing success from failure and concentrating resources. Successful partnerships with host countries, civil society, and business need to be recognized and repeated; those that have not been successful need to be honestly acknowledged and left behind.

The German Marshall Fund is supporting a Transatlantic Experts Group to examine successful and failed food security partnerships in east Africa, with the goal of transmitting best practices and policy recommendations to transatlantic and African policymakers and other stakeholders in early 2012. The group will look beyond high-level commitments to partnerships in practice on the ground, and will work to provide an honest view of what works and what doesn’t.

Even aggressive action to increase coordination and focus on successful partnership models will not relieve the current crisis in the Horn of Africa. The current situation calls for intensive and immediate humanitarian relief. However, in order to minimize the likelihood of future famines and food emergencies, much remains to be done in creating the robust, functioning food value chains that so many in the developed world take for granted.

Mark Allegrini is a Program Officer and Kate Ritterspach a Research Assistant for GMF’s Economic Policy Program.

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