Village seed systems and the biological diversity of millet crops in marginal environments of India

Nagarajan, Latha; Smale, Mélinda

doi:10.1007/s10681-006-9319-9

Cited by 26 publications

(23 citation statements)

References 16 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Many small-scale farmers, and particularly those in centers of crop diversity, still rely on traditional seed systems (28), e.g., for potatoes in the Andes (29,30), durum wheat (31) and sorghum (32) in Ethiopia, and millet in India (33). In the case of maize, estimates for 2006/2007 indicate that 65% of the total maize area in Eastern and Southern Africa (excluding South Africa) was planted using farm-saved seed (34); for Latin America and Asia (excluding China) at the end of the 1990s, these percentages were estimated at 55% and 35%, respectively (35).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Potential interventions will require the fostering of a wellfunctioning seed system, linking formal and informal seed systems and market and nonmarket transactions to stimulate and meet efficiently the demand of farmers for climate-adapted seed (29,33,40). This adjustment probably will require the establishment of new links within farmers' seed-source networks that go beyond their traditional spatial scopes to connect communities in current and future analog climates.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Assessing the vulnerability of traditional maize seed systems in Mexico to climate change

Bellon

Hodson

Hellin

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

138

111

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Climate change is predicted to have major impacts on small-scale farmers in Mexico whose livelihoods depend on rain-fed maize. We examined the capacity of traditional maize seed systems to provide these farmers with appropriate genetic material under predicted agro-ecological conditions associated with climate change. We studied the structure and spatial scope of seed systems of 20 communities in four transects across an altitudinal gradient from 10-2,980 m above sea level in five states of eastern Mexico. Results indicate that 90% of all of the seed lots are obtained within 10 km of a community and 87% within an altitudinal range of ±50 m but with variation across four agro-climate environments: wet lowland, dry lowland, wet upper midlatitude, and highlands. Climate models suggest a drying and warming trend for the entire study area during the main maize season, leading to substantial shifts in the spatial distribution patterns of agro-climate environments. For all communities except those in the highlands, predicted future maize environments already are represented within the 10-km radial zones, indicating that in the future farmers will have easy access to adapted planting material. Farmers in the highlands are the most vulnerable and probably will need to acquire seed from outside their traditional geographical ranges. This change in seed sources probably will entail important information costs and the development of new seed and associated social networks, including improved linkages between traditional and formal seed systems and more effective and efficient seed-supply chains. The study has implications for analogous areas elsewhere in Mexico and around the world.adaptation | crop diversity | landraces | genetic resources | food security

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Assessing the vulnerability of traditional maize seed systems in Mexico to climate change

Bellon

Hodson

Hellin

2011

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

138

111

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…They also show how the formal system can provide technologies and fresh ideas to revitalize the informal system; these should enable it to provide larger quantities of better quality planting material so that food supplies can then be sustainably increased across the Lake Zone. Despite "Informal seed systems (being) treated as vestigial or marginal to the process of economic development, and (being) more extensively documented by anthropologists, ethnobotanists and geographers" (Nagarajan and Smale 2007), we contend that the informal seed system has much to offer the development of the sweetpotato crop and probably other crops too in Africa. We also agree with McGuire and Sperling (2013) that resilience in seed systems to cope with chronic as well as acute crises derives from the informal private enterprise system.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 88%

Delivering New Technologies to the Tanzanian Sweetpotato Crop Through Its Informal Seed System

Lukonge¹,

Gibson

Laizer³

et al. 2015

Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Delivering new technologies to the Tanzanian sweetpotato crop through its informal seed systemThe concept of integrated seed sector development (ISSD) to-type. Tanzania has the second biggest production (3.0 x 10 6 MT) in Africa after Nigeria (3.4 x 10 6 MT). Sweetpotato is the third largest crop by weight (FAOSTAT 2014) and the Great Lakes region is a major area of production where, as throughout Africa, the crop is especially important to smallholders (Kapinga et al. 1995). There is a very long dry season there, crops being harvested as they reach maturity and to avoid loss through desiccation and weevil damage, so most farmers have no vines to plant when the rains come. Consequently, insufficient quality planting material at the start of the rainy season is a prime constraint on production there (Kapinga et al. 1995;Namanda et al. 2011) as in many African countries Gibson et al. 2009). In the informal seed system of sweetpotato, farmers with access to wetlands or land that can be irrigated and the 'skills, talent and gumption' Promoting such changes through interventions aimed at multipliers would require fewer resources, be self-maintaining and more sustainable than interventions aimed at sweetpotato farmers in general. It would also be consistent with the ISSD approach. The purpose of this paper is to describe the range and capacity of the informal sweetpotato seed system to supply vines sustainably to large numbers of farmers in Shinyanga and Meatu districts of the Lake Zone of Tanzania and then to document how the formal sector can supply improvements to it, using small demonstration trials to introduce improved technologies such as: fertilizer to boost vine production;  modern cultivars including OFSP;  RMT including more efficient irrigation.Furthermore, the paper assesses transporting vines from an area where they are easy to grow to sell them in Shinyanga and nearby markets. This longer-distance marketing is a strategy learnt from Uganda (Rachkara et al. 2015), can supplement vines from local multipliers' farms and provide a more comprehensive service. In documenting outcomes, this paper serves as one of the first evidence-based demonstrations that the ISSD approach can deliver improvements efficiently to the informal sector. In this case, delivery of the technologies was by members of a Tanzanian government agricultural research institute, the Agricultural Research Institute (ARI)-Ukiriguru, part of the Lake Zone Agricultural Research and Development Institute (LZARDI). The work is an outcome of many years of experiences by the authors and their institutes to develop a successful strategy for interacting with the sweetpotato vine supply system in order to achieve lasting improvements.

show abstract

“…Traditional practices of saving and sharing seed by and among farmers underpin these systems. These practices are embedded in network structures that connect farmers and landraces within and across environments -through seed flows and gene flow -and are essential to understand the spatial structure of crop genetic diversity and its dynamics (Gepts, 2006;Labeyrie et al, 2014;Nagarajan & Smale, 2007;Pautasso et al, 2013;Samberg, Fishman, & Allendorf, 2013;Vom Brocke, Christinck, Weltzien, Presterl, & Geiger, 2003;Westengen et al, 2014). Since the presence of genetic diversity in populations is fundamental for adaptive evolution in International Journal of Agricultural Sustainabilityresponse to changing environmental conditions (Sgro, Lowe, & Hoffmann, 2011), conserving these socio-biological systems is important because they contribute to retaining potentially useful but undetermined genetic variation, and to generating novel variation needed to maintain the capacity of crops to adapt to change (Bellon, 2009).…”

Section: The Public Benefits That On-farm Conservation Providesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Conserving landraces and improving livelihoods: how to assess the success of on-farm conservation projects?

Bellon

Gotor

Caracciolo

2014

International Journal of Agricultural Sustainability

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Smallholder farmers who grow diverse landraces in centres of crop diversity contribute to sustaining the capacity of agricultural and food systems to adapt to change by maintaining crop evolution in their fields today, thus enabling humanity to continue to have the broad genetic variation needed to adapt crops to changes tomorrow. Given this fact, the last 20 years have witnessed an ever-growing interest in on-farm conservation of crop infra-specific diversity. While numerous projects to support it have been, and continue to be, implemented worldwide, there has been very little systematic assessment of the extent to which these projects have been effective at contributing to the maintenance of crop diversity on-farm and the creation of associated benefits for the farmers involved. The factors and relationships implicated in attaining conservation and livelihood results are complex, so that a conceptual scheme that brings them together in a simplified but coherent fashion can be extremely useful for the scientists, donors, policy-makers and practitioners concerned. This paper presents a conceptual framework for analysing on-farm projects, the trade-offs involved and assesses their success in a more systematic way.

show abstract

Village seed systems and the biological diversity of millet crops in marginal environments of India

Cited by 26 publications

References 16 publications

Assessing the vulnerability of traditional maize seed systems in Mexico to climate change

Assessing the vulnerability of traditional maize seed systems in Mexico to climate change

Delivering New Technologies to the Tanzanian Sweetpotato Crop Through Its Informal Seed System

Conserving landraces and improving livelihoods: how to assess the success of on-farm conservation projects?

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About