Category: Indigenous knowledge systems

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Rebuilding livelihoods in Haiti through fairs

It’s very easy to assume that after a disaster one of the things that farmers would most welcome from the outside is good seed. But of course it’s a bit more complicated than that, as an assessment by Catholic Relief Services of the seed sector in Haiti after the recent earthquake makes clear. Perhaps the key result was that there was plenty of seed around:

Good quality seed of the varieties that farmers’ prefer is available in the areas surveyed. The household survey shows that farmers are utilizing similar levels of own seed stock as in previous years. Vendors in the market report normal levels of seed for sale.

The problem was access:

Families simply do not have resources available to make the usual investments in agriculture. This has led, in some instances, to decisions to actually cultivate less because of inability to acquire inputs (including seed, fertilizer, and animal traction).

There were also changes in cropping patterns, with a shift towards shorter-duration crops to get quick yields and income. The main recommendation was stark:

Direct seed distribution should not take place… This emergency is not the appropriate time to try to introduce improved varieties on anything more than a small scale for farmer evaluation.

And there was some trenchant criticism of previous seed distribution programmes:

…seed provided by FAO post hurricane last year either arrived too late to plant during the season or failed to germinate.

Rather, CRS recommended that there should be seed fairs to facilitate access to locally available and adapted planting material, food distribution to alleviate pressure on seed reserves and cash for work to build up household capital to purchase inputs. And also something I’d never heard of: livelihoods fairs, with vouchers. There’s not much on the internet about these, but they seem to take the idea of seed fairs and extend them to other necessities of rural life, such as tools, fertilizers and tin roofing. The idea is “to help restore liquidated reserves and enable farm households to start reinvesting in their productive capacity.”

Now that all seems very sensible, and it strikes me that it probably isn’t the fist time a survey along these lines has been done, and such recommendations put forward. But are the mistakes of the past being repeated anyway?

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Seed systems and survival

Two recent documents address seed systems in sub-Saharan Africa. One, from the Drylands Coordination Group in Norway looks at the relevance of the informal seed sector to farmers in southern Tigray, Ethiopia, using the famine of 1984 as a boundary across which to compare results. It’s a complex story that would repay study by someone expert in the subject matter, but this is striking:

Five cultivars of sorghum, one cultivar of tef and four cultivars of maize have been lost and others are on the verge of being lost from the farming system of the area. Early maturing sorghum cultivars from the informal seed are gaining upper hand and have already replaced the old but late maturing types.

It is tempting to see those changes as a response to changing weather patterns, and the study recommends research to make older varieties “as productive as they used to be”.

In Zambia, Danielle Nierenberg reports on her blog, the aid charity CARE is fostering a business-like approach to increasing the production of staple crops.

One way they’re doing this is by creating a network of agro-dealers who can sell inputs to their neighbors as well as educate them about how to use hybrid seeds, fertilizers, and other inputs. At the same time, “we are mindful” of the benefits of local varieties of seeds, says Harry Ngoma, Agriculture Advisor for the Consortium for Food Security, Agriculture and Nutrition, AIDS, Resiliency and Markets (C-FAARM).

Right on, Harry! Sounds very like the approach being promoted by AGRA in its pursuit of an African green revolution. And CARE is also promoting indigenous crops such as sorghum to complement Zambia’s appetite for maize. But is there a danger that this network of agro-dealers will be promoting the inputs that make them the most profit? There must be a way of tying rewards for advice to the practical outcome of following that advice.