The importance of seed provisioning in food security and nutrition, agricultural development and rural livelihoods, and agrobiodiversity and germplasm conservation is well accepted by policy makers, practitioners and researchers. The role of farmer seed networks is less well understood and yet is central to debates on current issues ranging from seed sovereignty and rights for farmers to GMOs and the conservation of crop germplasm. In this paper we identify four common misconceptions regarding the nature and importance of farmer seed networks today. (1) Farmer seed networks are inefficient for seed dissemination. (2) Farmer seed networks are closed, conservative systems. (3) Farmer seed networks provide ready, egalitarian access to seed. (4) Farmer seed networks are destined to weaken and disappear. We challenge these misconceptions by drawing upon recent research findings and the authors' collective field experience in studying farmer seed systems in Africa, Europe, Latin America and Oceania. Priorities for future research are suggested that would advance our understanding of seed networks and better inform agricultural and food policy

ABSTRACT. Analysis of seed exchange networks at a single point in time may reify sporadic relations into apparently fixed and longlasting ones. In northern Cameroon, where environment is not only strongly seasonal but also shows unpredictable interannual variation, farmers' social networks are flexible from year to year. When adjusting their strategies, Tupuri farmers do not systematically solicit the same partners to acquire the desired propagules. Seed acquisitions documented during a single cropping season may thus not accurately reflect the underlying larger social network that can be mobilized at the local level. To test this hypothesis, we documented, at the outset of two cropping seasons (2010 and 2011), the relationships through which seeds were acquired by the members of 16 households in a Tupuri community. In 2011, farmers faced sudden failure of the rains and had to solicit distant relatives, highlighting their ability to quickly trigger specific social relations to acquire necessary seeding material. Observing the same set of individuals during two successive years and the seed sources they solicited in each year enabled us to discriminate repeated relations from sporadic ones. Although farmers did not acquire seeds from the same individuals from one year to the next, they relied on quite similar relational categories of people. However, the worse weather conditions during the second year led to (1) a shift from red sorghum seeds to pearl millet seeds, (2) a geographical extension of the network, and (3) an increased participation of women in seed acquisitions. In critical situations, women mobilized their own kin almost exclusively. We suggest that studying the seed acquisition network over a single year provides a misrepresentation of the underlying social network. Depending on the difficulties farmers face, they may occasionally call on relationships that transcend the local relationships used each year.

In this paper we develop new indicators and statistical tests to characterize patterns of crop diversity at local scales. Households growing a large number of species or landraces are known to contribute an important share of local available diversity of both rare and common plants but the role of households with low diversity remain little understood: do they grow only common varieties-following a nestedness pattern typical of mutualistic networks in ecology-or do 'diversity poor' households also grow rare varieties? This question is pivotal in ongoing efforts to assess the contribution of small farmers to global agrobiodiversity at local scales. We develop new network-based approaches to characterize the distribution of local crop diversity at the village level (species and infra-species) and validate these approaches using meta-data sets from 10 countries. Our results highlight the sources of heterogeneity in the local crop diversity. We often identify two or more groups of households based on their different levels of diversity. In some datasets, 'diversity poor' households significantly contribute to the local crop diversity. Generally, we find that the distribution of crop diversity is more heterogeneous at the species than at the infra-species level. This analysis reveals the absence of a general pattern of crop diversity distribution independent of agro-ecological and socio-cultural context.

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