Poor seeds keep farmers poor – SSG report

In places like Ghana, Rwanda, Tanzania and Ethiopia, increasing productivity on smallholder farms is contributing to historical reductions in poverty, along with higher levels of food security and improved nutrition. This was contained in a recent report by the Seed Systems Group (SSG), an Africa-based nonprofit led by experts said to have played a pivotal role in breeding better crop varieties and launching more than 100 local seed companies in some 15 countries. They include places such as Ghana and Ethiopia, where the availability of improved seed has helped place them at the vanguard of Africa’s Green Revolution.

Contrasting the progress in the countries earlier identified, it stated that other countries such as Benin and Togo in West Africa, to Chad and the Democratic Republic of Congo in Central Africa, to Eritrea and Madagascar in the East, the situation is starkly different in terms of agricultural productivity.

In these places, it was noted that most farmers continue to struggle with poor harvests — their yields per acre or hectare are among the lowest in the world. As a result, those countries are seeing no improvements in hunger, poverty and malnutrition.

Now, SSG says it is embracing a more audacious goal. Just like the goal of bringing clean water, immunization and electricity to every Africa household, it believes that every farmer in every village should have access to high-quality seed for a wide range of crop varieties.

According to SSG, if African farmers are to feed a hungry continent, the least that can be done is ensure they have access to the best seed available — and that it is also the right mix of seeds for providing Africans with a healthy, sustainable diet.

SSG has started its work by focusing on a group of 15 countries including DRC, Angola, Cote D’Ivoire, Cameroon, and Niger, cumulatively estimated to be home to 315 million people who have yet to experience the benefits of better seed. This absence is a significant barrier to reducing high levels of hunger, malnutrition and poverty in a context of climate change. And as the populations of these countries are growing rapidly, serious questions loom over how they will cope.

As the report notes, seeds set the limit of what farmers can achieve. If African farmers continue to plant seed for aging crop varieties, no amount of additional production improvements will get them the harvests they need to overcome the region’s struggle with hunger and poverty or the means to adapt to climate change.