Working with an exporter and local producers, EMBRAPA, Brazil's national agricultural research organization, developed technology for small-scale processing of cashew nuts. For more than 30 years, the Chilean Instituto de Investigaciones Agropecuarias partnered with a brewery to finance the breeding of barley varieties suited to Chile's climatic conditions. And Uruguayan farmers, millers, bakeries, and other stakeholders formed a partnership to improve the competitiveness of Uruguayan wheat.

Researchers have studied these and 124 other cases as part of a recently concluded three-year project on public-private partnerships (PPPs) for agroindustrial development in Latin America.The study--led by IFPRI and implemented in collaboration with the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), several national agricultural research systems, and regional research bodies--is a first-ever attempt to systematically collect information on PPPs that seek to generate innovations in agriculture.

"Although private-public partnerships recently have become a means of developing technological innovations throughout the world, in Latin America, especially in the less-developed Latin countries, such initiatives are rarely planned and executed well," says Jaime Tola, project leader and research fellow in IFPRI's ISNAR Division."Many efforts to build partnerships between public research organizations and the private sector fail to bring about pro-poor development or to develop new or improved products for the market, disappointing all parties."

To learn about potential benefits and pitfalls of private-public partnerships and draw lessons from success stories, researchers surveyed nearly 500 people involved in agricultural-development-related PPPs. Project staff also invested heavily in capacity building, training 110 stakeholders from 15 countries in the art and science of partnership building. Based on these findings, IFPRI is currently developing a guidebook that will present a model for building PPPs.

Key lessons include the importance of identifying and negotiating common interests, monitoring partnerships and fostering synergy to improve innovations and outputs, and capitalizing on the benefits of shared resources and learning opportunities. Milk producers and marketers, for example, jointly learned how to improve dairy products in response to production and market demands.

According to IFPRI researcher Frank Hartwich, "Public administrators often view private-public partnerships as the privatization of research. Instead, they should see them as tools for improving public research and opportunities for designing innovative partnerships that address important public needs, such as poverty alleviation and rural development."