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Product information
FOCUS
Seed
Special
Community seed banks:
Farmers’ platform for crop
conservation and improvement
THABO TJIKANA, NKAT MALULEKE
and
MPOLOKENG MOKOENA,
all from the Directorate: Genetic Resources, Department of Agriculture, Forestry
and Fisheries and
RONNIE VERNOOY
and
BHUWON STHAPIT,
both from Bioversity International
The Gumbu home based care seed bank committee.
A
gricultural biodiversity, also called agrobiodiversity, used
directly or indirectly for food and agriculture comprises the
diversity of plant genetic resources and species used for
food, fuel, fodder, fibre and pharmaceuticals.
Components of agrobiodiversity include agricultural ecosystems,
crop varieties, genes in plants, and animal species. From an ecologi-
cal perspective, agrobiodiversity supports and protects human lives
as it provides continued inputs for evolution and increases the pro-
ductive capacity of ecosystems. The resilience and capacity of the
ecosystems to deal with change is weakened when agrobiodiversity
becomes less diverse.
The principal stewards of agrobiodiversity are people who use and
depend upon it, living in communities where this diversity continues
to exist. They have the skills and knowledge that have contributed to
the development of distinct types and varieties of plants and animals
vital to food and health security. The community systems that have
maintained agrobiodiversity are increasingly coming under pressure
from factors such as drought, crop failure, difficult storage condi-
tions and contamination from external seed sources. As a result,
the quantity of seed and number of plant varieties locally accessible
(i.e. available and affordable) to farmers for planting becomes
negatively affected.
With agricultural modernisation, farmers are increasingly purchas-
ing more of their seed requirements rendering local seed conser-
vation less important. As commercial varieties replace older local
varieties, the older varieties become increasingly unavailable in
many communities. There is an urgent need for communities to safe-
ly conserve their seed, not just to ensure access to the next season’s
planting material, but also to safeguard planting material that may
possess valuable genes for future crop improvement programmes,
for example to adapt to climate change.
Background
Globally, saving and improving seed as a locally organised commu-
nity effort has been around for about 30 years. In 1996, the Depart-
ment of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (DAFF) established the
National Plant Genetic Resources Centre to develop and implement
policies, legislation, strategies and norms and standards on the man-
agement of plant genetic resources for food and agriculture, to regu-
late and promote the propagating material of genetic resources for
food and agriculture and to provide for risk mitigating systems in
support of agrobiodiversity.
South Africa, just like other countries, has a long history of tradi-
tional smallholder agriculture in which farmers save a portion from
their harvest for the following planting season. They have done so
for decades, mostly on an individual basis and not collectively within
communities.
Although many farmers still save their own seeds in this way, agro-
biodiversity conservation and sustainable use can be more effective
if properly managed at community level and spread over the entire
agricultural landscape. The first recorded community seed banks in
South Africa (which are currently not functional) were constructed
for the purpose of seed storage in the Sekhukhune District, Limpopo,
with the Phadima Agricultural Association as well as in KwaNgwa-
nase, KwaZulu-Natal, with the KwaNgwanase Farmers’ Organisation,
in collaboration with the NGO Biowatch South Africa.
Taking into account the need for expansion to promote on-farm
management and conservation of field and landrace crops as a key
component of the country’s
in situ
conservation strategy, the DAFF
embarked on the establishment of a new strategy to set up com-
munity seed banks in Limpopo and Eastern Cape. Bioversity Interna-
tional joined forces with DAFF to implement this new strategy.
Gumbu village seed selection.
Photo: Ronnie Vernooy
17
March 2016