Do farmer seed systems need regulation?

John MacRobert, June 2024

In Africa, by far the greatest amount of crop fields are planted with seed originating from the informal seed system as opposed to the formal seed system. Generally speaking, maize is the principal field crop where a significant amount of seed is sourced from the formal seed sector, along with smaller quantities of soyabeans, beans, sorghum and wheat. Formal seed systems are growing across the continent but are most advanced in a small number of countries, such as South Africa, Egypt, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania. Many horticultural crops are also serviced by the formal seed sector, but this is mainly for exotics, like tomatoes, onions and brassicas, while indigenous vegetables are mostly planted with seed from farmer seed systems. Thus, farmer seed systems are significant and important for the majority of food production in Africa. So, do they need regulation?

The formal seed sector is based on enforceable seed regulations that focus on variety registration, seed certification and phytosanitary assurance. Variety registration is the entry point for seed production and certification, and may also involve plant variety protection or plant breeders’ rights in some countries. The variety registration regulations are based on two principles, namely DUS and VCU, or “Distinct, Uniform and Stable” and “Value for Cultivation and Use”, respectively; the first assuring uniqueness, uniformity and repeatability, the second, supposedly assuring the variety has superior qualities for farmers and/or consumers. Seed certification is about assurance of seed quality, covering genetic identity and purity on one hand, and minimum seed purity and germination on the other. Phytosanitary assurance is concerned with restricting plant disease spread through seed.

All these aspects of seed regulations are good and proper, and certainly they help define the activities of the formal sector, bring in a means of government control of the seed market and purport to give a measure of farmer protection. But are they necessary either for the formal or informal seed sector? A formal seed company has the objective of supplying good seed to farmers of the best varieties, because this is a means of assuring their continued existence through meeting customer expectations. Any seed company that supplies poor seed or unwanted varieties will not last long in the market, because customers – farmers – are the ultimate arbiter of seed quality. Consequently, a company’s own internal seed quality assurance systems will, or should, always trump any legally imposed seed regulations.

One may argue that not all seed companies are trustworthy, and therefore farmers need to be protected by seed regulations. Furthermore, in Africa, farmers are numerous, and most farms are small and therefore the quantity of individual seed purchases are small, so farmers who receive poor quality seed will find it difficult to obtain recourse. Thus, formal seed companies need to be held accountable for what they produce and sell, and seed regulations provide a means of achieving this. Also, when it comes to import and export of seed, regulations are a means of assuring the seed is of a variety and quality standard suitable for the importing customer. Thus, seed regulations do play a role in the formal seed sector. But they are in a way irrelevant to a quality-conscious seed company and are thus simply a necessary formality of doing business.

Now, what of the informal seed sector? These seed systems are community based, with farmers growing, saving, and exchanging or selling seed of local, adapted and desired varieties, usually to neighbours and relatives. These varieties are well known, the suppliers are recognised members of the community, and the production methods are seen and evaluated by the producer and consumer in an intimate way because this occurs in their vicinity. Seed quality is rarely a problem because the seed is fresh, and farmers know how to select and store their seed – after all, they have been doing this for generations. Therefore, the informal seed systems are self-regulating and perpetual. Farmers who supply poor seed to their community will clearly be identified and sanctioned in one way or another. Thus, there is no need to impose any kind of formal seed regulatory or certification system on farmers’ seed systems.

However, farmer seed systems based on locally developed and maintained varieties may be vulnerable to exploitation by commercial seed companies. In most countries there is no legislation preventing an entrepreneur from collecting farmer varieties and utilizing them for commercial purposes, either directly for sale or indirectly with breeding. This is where some form of legal protection for farmer varieties or mechanism for benefit sharing is needed.

Furthermore, informal seed systems might well benefit from capacity building to give farmers more skills in seed value chain management. This may cover aspects such as variety maintenance for posterity and diversity, field seed production to assure varietal integrity and productivity, post-harvest management to assure good germination capacity, and seed marketing to improve availability of seed of good local varieties to more farmers. The more efficiently farmers’ seed systems work the better will it be for community resilience, independence, crop diversity and food sovereignty.

Farmers’ seed systems support much of the food production in Africa and are therefore critical to agricultural development and food security. Formal seed systems, while playing an important role in seed provision of commodity crops are nonetheless insignificant suppliers of seed of non-hybrid crops, most indigenous crops and many farmer-desired varieties. The regulation of formal seed systems is warranted from the perspective of assuring new varieties are better than existing varieties and meet market requirements, and that seed meets basic quality standards, but there is no need, in my opinion, to impose seed certification regulations on the informal seed system because they are self-regulating. Rather, regulators and stakeholders should be promoting and facilitating the development of the informal seed sector to function in its noble position of ensuring seed sovereignty, and find ways of protecting farmers seeds rights for posterity. In this way, the food and feed production systems of family farms and communities will be functional, resilient and regenerative.

(The views expressed herein are my own.)