BRIA Workshop to Strengthen Regional Capacity Development in Rice Sector

The German International Cooperation or GIZ defines CD as the process of strengthening the abilities of individuals, organizations and societies to make effective use of the resources, in order to achieve their own goals on a sustainable basis.

According to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the CD process consists of engagement of partners and building consensus, assessment of capacity assets and needs, defining CD strategies, implementation of the CD strategies, and monitoring and evaluation of the CD strategies.The CD success factors in line with GIZ Capacity WORKS include strategy or the strategic orientation, cooperation between people and organization to facilitate change, steering or an optimal structure, processes for social innovation, and learning & innovation capacity.

Mr. Bruce Milligan, Regional Manager, Sustainability and Product Stewardship, Crop Protection Division, Asia Pacific, BASF South EAST Asia Pte Ltd, provided CD input for BRIA, sharing the company's past experiences, progressive outreach approach and key leanings. He suggested that to enhance the likelihood for farmers to accept a message that leads to behaviour change, the message should be simple and positive, give benefits and reason why farmers should take such an action and 'emotionally' appeal to what they care.

BRIA is a PPP project. A PPP represents collaborative mechanisms in which public organizations and private entities share resources, knowledge, and risks in order to achieve more efficiency in the production and delivery of products and services, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI).

In Thailand, GIZ implements the BRIA project in cooperation with the Rice Department, its public partner, and BASF and Bayer CropScience, its private partners. In addition to representatives of the public and private partners and BRIA Thailand, key members of BRIA Indonesia, the Philippines and Vietnam presented their capacity building activities in the PPP context in this event.

A PPP offers better performance and sustainability as the public sector can develop sectoral policy, establish governance and management frameworks, provide an enabling environment and incentive system to foster sector development, set rules and regulations and ensure their enforcement while the private sector has knowledge and know-how, investment, cooperation and compliance management framework, R&D and technological advancement, business model, and corporate social responsibility.

Dr. Martin Maerkl, Sustainable Development Manager, Bayer CropScience AG shared some critical success factors for PPP's from a private sector perspective. Apart from full commitment to resources, people and financial support, the private party has to understand the complexity of the public sector such as approval of resources, structure in decision making whereas the public party has to recognize and understand the business interest of the private player. The identification of common goals and strategy needs to be clear and the implementation part is, to him, 'challenging.' Bayer is aiming for sustainability, environmental and social responsibility.

He emphasized the importance of capacity building for rice cultivation, saying that rice feeds 3 billion people and the demand for rice will grow 30% by 2030. Rice is grown on 160M hectares (90% in Asia) by 144M smallholder farmers, uses 30% of global fresh water. Rice demand, labour shortage, water efficiency, technology gaps and public policies will drive the intensification of production inputs.BRIA will use the output from this two-day workshop to work with its public-private partners to boost the rice sector in Southeast Asia.

• ข่าว Secretariat