Public Private Partnership for effective marketing of Agricultural Produce

Public-Private Partnership is a contractual agreement between a public agency and a private sector entity. Through this agreement, the skills and assets of each sector (public and private) are shared in delivering a service or facility for the use of the general public. In addition to the sharing of resources, each party shares the risks and potential rewards. On the one hand, public sector has highly skilled and efficient manpower in agriculture and on the other hand private sector has excellent managerial resources. The decentralized decision-making in private sector helps in reducing time for commercialization. Proper budget management and global regulatory expertise are certain other benefits of the system, while availability of diverse germplasm of different crops and diverse breeding crops can be boasted by the public sector. Public-Private partnership in India are mostly involved in contract farming models undertaken by agri-business companies which usually takes care of pre-agreed price, quality assurance quantity and time of delivery, and as per the contract farmers are required to plant the contractor's crop on his land and to harvest and deliver it to the contractor, based upon anticipated yield and contracted acreage mostly at a pre-agreed price. PPP has made positive changes in market linkage of farm produce some of them are: capacity building of farm families; reduction of risk and uncertainties; social mobilization and economic empowerment of farmers; knowledge management; development of high end technologies; reduction of risks and uncertainties; development of high end technologies; reduction of risks and uncertainties; productivity enhancement; economic empowerment of farm women; gender mainstreaming in agriculture, and many more. Some of the benefits which may accrue due to Public-Private partnerships in agricultural sector. Some of these are discussed in detail in the paper.