The Purchase for Progress (P4P) is a five-years initiative of the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP). It enables low-income farmers to supply food to the WFP's operations. Eventually the transaction can be regulated by a forward contract, with the farmer agreeing in selling in the future (up to three years) a certain amount of output at a fixed price. Essentially, the P4P program aims to create a wide and sophisticate market for commodities in developing countries. According to the WFP the initiative, that will be piloted in 21 countries, will help hundreds of thousands of poor farmers to "gain access to reliable markets to sell their surplus crops at competitive prices".[1]
Critics of the P4P initiative stress that massive commodity market speculations are responsible for increasing the world food prices.[2]