Participation of producers' organizations involved in Peruvians value chains to strengthen innovation systems and service provision

As observed in many developing countries the Peruvian government is willing to establish a system of science, technology and innovation, decentralized, plural, and oriented by demand through the private sector. From 2001 to 2010 the INCAGRO project financed by the World Bank designed a new way to identify and finance innovative experiences in rural areas by generating knowledge and technologies useful for stakeholders to improve their productive activities and then their livelihoods taking into account the environmental and social dimensions of the development. The article is aiming at analyzing the role of public action aimed at promoting innovation systems by mainly strengthening POs working in order to stimulate innovation processes and service provision to farmers within different value chain. The agricultural innovation system provides a relevant framework to analyze innovation processes. It highlights some elements to be taken into account to understand the innovation process : the resources and strategies of each stakeholder, the relationships between stakeholders, their social networks. The innovation system could be analyzed at national level focusing on relationships between research organizations, education organizations,extension, private firms. The innovation system could be analyzed at local level on relationships between actors involved in economic activities. In this sense the actors involved in a value chain and the actors providing assistance or services to these actors form an innovation system. Some authors argue that a few actors may play a specific role by strengthening the interactions, increasing the flow of information, or facilitating the negotiations between actors. PO could play such a role because it is an intermediary organization between farmers and the outside world. We carried out a study to better understand the contribution of the projects financed by INCAGRO to the innovation system at value chain level. The objectives of the study are (i) to characterize the innovation processes at local level and the bottlenecks the stakeholders face, (ii) to analyze the role play by POs in the innovation processes and especially in the interactions between the actors dealing with these innovation processes. We selected three value chains including a relevant number of projects financed by INCAGRO and with different level of POs participation within the value chain (alpaca,coffee, grain legume). The INCAGRO database provided the main quantitative features of all of the projects. A literature review of internal documents provided key information on the activities and the results of the different type of projects. For each value chain we selected one area per value chain to carry out in-depth qualitative analysis. The diversity of topics addressed by the INCAGRO projects is more important in the coffee value chain and the alpaca value chain than in the grain legume value chain. This variability depends on the capacities of stakeholders participating in the value chain to influence the choices, the emphasis put by the service providers involved in the INCAGRO projects either on the strengthening of the farmers and POs or on the technology development, the historical links between researchers and other stakeholders involved in the value chain. In many projects managed by POs several activities have been carried out to achieve the objectives including training with producers' groups, individual advice, national and international trips for producers' representatives,specialized advice on production, strengthening of managerial skills, specialized advice on marketing. Advice is provided by several private service providers for each project. Based on the results we can identify the role the POs can really play to stimulate an innovation process and the provision of services and the limits they face.First POs are able to strengthen the production of the members by providing services(information, training, marketing, etc). But it depends on (i) the POs' resources and capacities, (ii) the degree of priority of the production for farmers and (iii) the structure of the value chain (possibility of free rider behavior, importance of transaction costs). Second, POs are able to buy services to private service providers and better define the nature of advice and improve the quality. POs can reduce the cost of advisory services with a better organization of the training, better dissemination of information and technologies through social network. The funding of advice depends on POs' resources and on the nature of advice (public vs private good). The access to several funding mechanisms is a key issue (fee of members, product level, others projects). Third, POs could participation in the orientation of research programs but are not really able to influence the choices. Private companies have more capacities to influence the choices. Fourth, POs participate in coordination mechanisms because they act as an intermediary organization between producers and traders/exporters/processors. POs with experience are able to coordinate action of several local actors (public extension, private extension, NGO, credit organization, etc.) in order to adapt the supply and the demand of services through a co-construction of the service. However other mechanisms are in place to coordinate the stakeholders of the value chain as professional bodies or specific committees. (Résumé d'auteur)