“Many organizations working in research and development look on the private sector as donors,” says Tony Simons, Director General of the World Agroforestry Centre, “but for us the relationship is about more than finance. We believe we can help private sector businesses to become more sustainable and environmentally aware.”
You expect to see stories about Mars, Inc., Unilever, Syngenta and Danone in the business pages of newspapers and magazines; but they also feature in this annual report. They are among the growing list of companies which have developed partnerships with the World Agroforestry Centre.
In 2014, Ramni Jamnadass, head of research on Tree Diversity, Domestication and Delivery, co-authored a major review of public-private partnerships in agroforestry. Published as a chapter in the Encyclopaedia of Agriculture and Food Systems, the study showed that publicprivate partnerships can have a substantial impact on the livelihoods of smallholder farmers and marginalized groups in developing countries.
“Partnerships combine the strengths of public organizations and businesses,” says Ramni. “They can reduce the cost of research, facilitate greater innovation and enhance the impact of research on people’s livelihoods.” She believes organizations like the World Agroforestry Centre can learn a great deal from the private sector, such as the best way of launching new products, the importance of demandside analysis, and the willingness to terminate projects when they fail to perform.
One of the six case studies in the chapter focuses on the Vision for Change (V4C) project, initiated by Mars, Inc. in Côte d’Ivoire. Working in partnership with the government of Côte d’Ivoire, national agricultural institutions and the World Agroforestry Centre, Mars is helping farmers to tackle problems such as depleted soils, the lack of improved planting material, ageing orchards, and pests and diseases. Besides rehabilitating old cocoa farms to increase yields, the project has a strong element of community empowerment.
By 2015, over 10,000 farmers had benefited from improved technologies, the availability of superior planting material and the adoption of good agricultural practices. “None of this could have been achieved without the involvement of all sectors,” says Christophe Kouamé, country director of the V4C programme. “Public research organizations such as ours bring skills in generating knowledge and innovation. Governments play an important role in developing enabling policies, and NGOs contribute expertise by working with farmers and processors.”
The other five case studies focus on the production of acacia in Vietnam; allanblackia oil in Africa (see box: Seeds of success); mangoes in Kenya; jungle rubber in Indonesia; and jatropha, whose oil-rich seeds can be processed into biofuel.
Drawing on the lessons learned through these partnerships, Ramni and her colleagues concluded that there are a number of factors that ensure effective public-private partnerships in agroforestry. These include: agreement on common goals among all partners; putting in place effective governance, monitoring and decision-making mechanisms to deal with tensions and conflicts; and the open sharing of information. “If we are going to realize the potential of under-developed agroforestry commodities that bring significant benefits to smallholders, we need to catalyse more publicprivate partnerships,” says Ramni.
Forging new partnerships
In November 2014, the World Agroforestry Centre entered into anew partnership with the French cosmetics company Clarins inChina. Over the coming years, the Seeds of Beauty project will helppreserve wild plant populations, improve farm productivity and helpfarmers to diversify their incomes. “We built Clarins thanks to plants,”said Clarins Managing Director, Olivier Courtins at the launch of thepartnership. “This project is for biodiversity, the environment andruralité.”
The project will identify plants which are becoming rare in the wild,encourage farmers to grow them on their farms to reduce wildharvesting, explore the agro-ecological knowledge of villagers, andoffer training in agroforestry. “The project is a good testing ground forClarins,” says Jianchu Xu, who leads the World Agroforestry Centre’sresearch in China and Central Asia. “Clarins plans to share thebenefits with the communities, so we are happy to support them.”
During the course of 2014, the World Agroforestry Centre alsoestablished new partnerships with the US seed company Pioneerand with the construction company Lafarge. With Pioneer, the publicprivatepartnership will explore whether seeds for nitrogen-fixingtrees can be marketed alongside maize seeds. The partnership withLafarge will investigate whether Uganda produces sufficient coffeehusks and other agricultural residue to power the company’s cementfurnaces.
In February 2015, a new Livelihoods Fund for Family Farming(Livelihoods 3F) was launched in Paris at a high-level round tableon impact investment organized by the French Ministry of ForeignAffairs. The founding investors, Danone and Mars, Inc., share theWorld Agroforestry Centre’s conviction that if we are going to satisfythe needs of our growing population, small-scale farmers musttransform themselves from subsistence producers into profitablebusinesses. The new fund, launched with US$120 million capital, willsupport projects that restore degraded environments and improvethe productivity and living conditions of rural farmers in developingcountries.
Seeds of success
In terms of its outward appearance Beckel Gold margarine, now on sale in stores in Sweden, looks much like any other margarine with its shiny wrapping paper. But this is a margarine with a difference: it is the first to use oil extracted from allanblackia seeds, harvested by villagers in Africa, and it represents over 10 years of hard work by a range of organizations involved in the Allanblackia Partnership.
In 2002, Unilever realized that seeds of the allanblackia tree produced an oil with excellent properties for use in margarines and spreads. To exploit this, the company helped set up the Novella Project, a public-private partnership initially comprising Unilever, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the Netherlands Development Organization (SNV) and the World Agroforestry Centre. As there was – and still is – insufficient supply from the wild, the World Agroforestry Centre coordinated allanblackia research to establish a domestication strategy for cultivating the tree on smallholder farms in countries such as Tanzania, Nigeria and Ghana.
“Our partnership has pursued allanblackia not as another wonder crop promising to save Africa, but as a model for how to build a sustainable value chain, based on local resources, local input, and with clear benefits to local communities, the climate, and consumers around the world,” said Chris Buss of IUCN at the product launch.
Swedish shoppers are now getting a taste of things to come. It is hoped that the allanblackia partnership will become a model of how to develop agroforestry crops in a way that provides tangible benefits to local communities and the environment.
