Guide for designing a national seed road map

Boef, Walter Simon de; Thijssen, M.H.; Bonnand, Johann; Steeg, Emily ter; Broek, Joep van den; Borman, Gareth; Subedi, Abishkar; Posthumus, Héléna; Brouwer, Herman

doi:10.18174/585990

Cited by 3 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…The assessment tools are elaborated in the Guide for designing a National Seed Road Map (NSRM) (De Boef & Thijssen, 2023). They were combined and adapted based on the purpose and context of the assessment.…”

Section: Seed Sector Assessment Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the performance of Egypt’s seed sector

Thijssen¹,

Bishaw²,

Ahmed³

et al. 2023

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Egypt is the agribusiness powerhouse of the Middle East and North Africa (MENA-region), watered by the Nile, with age-old soils in the delta, desert oases and the Nile, and with farming experience capable of greening the desert with productive agriculture. It is not only the region's primary producer of many crops like potatoes and onions; with over a hundred million people it is the greatest consumer market and biggest labour reservoir. Egypt is a major producer and exporter of agricultural products such as especially citrus and potatoes, which support Egypt's food security and unlock opportunities for Egypt's local market and export.To the Netherlands, Masr (Egypt) is not a pure development partner country, like fragile states in the Sahel or the Horn of Africa. Rather it is a 'combi-country' where we work on an integrated cooperation, trade and investment agenda. With a focus on Climate and Water Smart Agriculture the NL-Masr Agri-food Network will work with Dutch, Egyptian and international partners on the basis of mutual interest mutual benefit to create innovative, inclusive and sustainable win-wins.While the Egyptian agriculture sector is mature, it is not yet future proof. It is facing challenges such as water scarcity, contamination of soils and water due to excessive chemical input use, and land fragmentation, in the face of climate change, disrupted global supply chains and population growth. This creates a pressure to go from agri-business as usual to more resilient farming and agri-business models, based on investing in the soil, investing in collaboration, and investing in local innovation.The seed sector is central to responding to these challenges, by providing improved varieties for climate resilience. This requires attention that traits beyond productivity, taste and esthetics should be taken along, but also tolerance and resistance to pests, diseases, heat and salinity. The Integrated Seed Sector Development approach, developed by applied researchers at WUR will be especially suited to these challenges. Pluriformity will support the diversity needed for a transition to a food system able to provide sufficient, healthy and sustainable diets for all. This will allow Egypt to develop its own specific public-private approach to provide access to the seeds that farmers need to serve people, planet and profit.

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Section: Seed Sector Assessment Toolsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the performance of Egypt’s seed sector

Thijssen¹,

Bishaw²,

Ahmed³

et al. 2023

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“…Regardless of their obvious economic value, it is well established that LR are increasingly, globally threatened (Vavilov, 1957;Bennett, 1971;Harlan, 1972;1975;Frankel, 1970;Frankel, 1972;Frankel, 1973;Hawkes, 1983) and it has been argued that they are the most severely threatened element of all biodiversity (Maxted, 2006). The justification for this proposition being: (i) there are very few inventories of extant LR in each country, each region, or globally (Maxted and Scholten, 2007;FAO, 2011: Jarvis et al, 2011de Boef et al, 2013;Almeida et al, 2023); (ii) some government agencies and seed companies are actively promoting the replacement of genetically diverse LR by modern genetically uniform cultivars (Frankel and Hawkes, 1975;Harlan, 1975;Negri, 2005); (iii) in most countries no agency is direct responsibility for their conservation (Raggi et al, 2022); (iv) LR sales have been and are impacted by seed legislation that requires all crop seed to be registered before it can be sold and to comply involves an additional cost to individual growers so inadvertently restricts seed sale and LR production (Maxted et al, 2013); (v) the internationalisation of food systems and pressure of evolving markets predicates varietal standards and uniformity (Negri, 2003;Joshi et al, 2004;Maxted et al, 2013); (vi) LR maintainers are often subsistence farmer growing LR for family or local consumption, but their prime motivation is commercial gain or food production not LR conservation for its own sake (Veteläinen et al, 2009); (vii) LR maintainers are almost always elderly and their number is dwindling each year (average age in the UK was 65 (Scholten et al, 2008); (viii) there is ineffective transmission of LR knowledge (cultivation and marketing) from maintainer generation to generation (Negri, 2003;Camacho-Villa et al, 2005); (ix) the traditional LR maintenance from generation to generation is breaking down with the children of maintainers failing to take over LR maintenance or farming altogether…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards a practical threat assessment methodology for crop landraces

Almeida,

Barata,

De Haan

et al. 2024

Front. Plant Sci.

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Crop landraces (LR), the traditional varieties of crops that have been maintained for millennia by repeated cycles of planting, harvesting, and selection, are genetically diverse compared to more modern varieties and provide one of the key components for crop improvement due to the ease of trait transfer within the crop species. However, LR diversity is increasingly threatened with genetic erosion and extinction by replacement with improved cultivars, lack of incentives for farmers to maintain traditional agricultural systems, and rising threats from climate change. Their active conservation is necessary to maintain this critical resource. However, as there are hundreds of thousands of LR and millions of LR populations for crops globally, active conservation is complex and resource-intensive. To assist in implementation, it is useful to be able to prioritise LR for conservation action and an obvious means of prioritisation is based on relative threat assessment. There have been several attempts to propose LR threat assessment methods, but none thus far has been widely accepted or applied. The aim of this paper is to present a novel, practical, standardised, and objective methodology for LR threat assessment derived from the widely applied IUCN Red Listing for wild species, involving the collation of time series information for LR population range, LR population trend, market, and farmer characteristics and LR context information. The collated information is compared to a set of threat criteria and an appropriate threat category is assigned to the LR when a threshold level is reached. The proposed methodology can be applied at national, regional, or global levels and any crop group.

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“…This also involved helping to make a sector vision of what the transformed sector would be in the future, and strategizing on how this vision could be achieved. In its sector programmes, WCDI often provided input to design strategies which stimulated sector transformation towards higher levels of performance and sustainability (such as the development of national seed road maps, for which see DeBoef and Thijssen, 2023). WCDI in its programmes started helping sector champions to collaboratively address problems and opportunities and continue the transformation process towards a next level of sector performance.Additionally, WCDI started to help sector actors to monitor progress in improving sector performance targeted at selected priorities, by undertaking baselines and subsequent repeated measures.…”

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confidence: 99%