Category: Seed systems

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The plot thickens

I’m slowly making my way through the open access book “Sustainable Agroecology: Actors, Practices, Experiences and Perceptions,” edited by Javier Becerril García, Paulina Martínez Isidro, Praveen Jha, Elisabeth Tuider, and Andreas Thiel. It’s like 300 pages, so I may be some time.

The book brings together 15 case studies from different authors around the world exploring how agroecological approaches can support rural livelihoods and nutrition, while sustaining agricultural diversity, local knowledge and cultures. Several chapters highlight the role of farmers, particularly women, in maintaining traditional varieties through seed selection, saving and exchange.

One describes the Maya milpa system in Yucatán, where the Three Sisters — maize, beans and squash — are grown alongside other crops and managed as part of a wider landscape of home gardens, fallows and forests. Another examines the remarkable diversity of Mexican home gardens, which can contain more than a hundred plant species and serve as reservoirs of useful plants, many of them threatened.

A particularly interesting example comes from Chiapas, where a group of Indigenous women, the “Guardians of the Seeds”, established a community seed store and organised the conservation and exchange of native crops, combining traditional knowledge with technical support. The book also looks at the revival of underutilised crops in Europe, including bere barley in Orkney and local bean and wheat varieties in Italy and Greece, showing how new markets can help bring neglected diversity back into cultivation.

The authors have relatively little to say about formal genebanks — but that’s ok. The contribution of the book is to underline what genebanks cannot do alone: maintain the knowledge, seed systems, markets and farming practices that keep crop diversity in use and allow it to continue evolving.

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Brainfood: Gender edition

  • Informality in food environments: a systematic review of nutrition, livelihood, and sociopolitical outcomes and implications for food policy. A review of 327 studies across 64 countries shows women make up the majority of informal vendors, and their businesses are shaped by gendered constraints: eg access to public space, regulation, childcare and personal safety. Food policy needs to recognise informal food environments and address their social and political dimensions, not treat them as peripheral to the formal food system.
  • Role of urban and peri-urban agriculture in nutritional diversity, cultural resilience and community-based food security in an Eastern Himalayan city. A study of 150 households in Imphal, Northeast India, finds that almost all urban households engage in some form of food production, with women managing most of it. Container, rooftop and terrace cultivation help maintain access to a diversity of fresh vegetables and herbs as traditional homestead gardens disappear under urbanisation, contributing significantly to nutritional security, cultural continuity and community resilience.
  • Land tenure as a catalyst: Synergizing gender equality and agrobiodiversity conservation for sustainable development in Asian vulnerable areas. An analysis of 1,089 households across 12 sites in five Asian countries finds that women with secure land tenure manage greater crop species and variety diversity, because they can make independent decisions. The relationship varies considerably among countries and agroecologies, but it seems that strengthening women’s land rights can deliver benefits for both gender equality and agrobiodiversity conservation.
  • The gender dynamics of crop varietal choices in rural Kenya: navigating risk, diversification, and decision-making. Drawing on interviews and focus groups across five Kenyan counties, this study examines how women and men negotiate crop varietal choices in the context of unequal access to resources and climate uncertainty. Both value production characteristics, but women place greater emphasis on processing and consumption qualities, while men tend to prioritise marketability and yield potential. Land ownership, household authority and cultural norms influence whose preferences prevail, with implications for conservation, breeding priorities and seed systems.
  • Gender matters in seed system assessments: evidence from smallholder farms in Morocco, Senegal, and Madagascar. Surveys of 1,054 smallholder farms reveal substantial differences between women’s and men’s accounts of seed management and sourcing practices. Women are systematically underrepresented, partly because researchers commonly interview male household heads and overlook the constraints imposed by women’s care responsibilities. Gender-disaggregated data collection is thus essential for understanding how seed systems actually work, and seed assessments can reproduce the very inequalities they are supposed to measure.
  • Sons or seeds: gender, care work, and agrobiodiversity in translocal households of rural China. Fieldwork in two mountainous Chinese villages explores the dilemma facing rural women who balance caring for family members with maintaining local seeds and agroecological practices. As men migrate for work, women take on more agricultural responsibilities, but are also expected to provide childcare and look after older relatives. Women’s knowledge and labour sustain agrobiodiversity while remaining undervalued and frequently uncompensated. Don’t romanticise women as natural guardians of seeds while overlooking the economic and personal sacrifices involved.
  • Feminist Agroecology and Criollo Hens: Women’s Everyday Resistance in Colombia. The expansion of industrial poultry production in Colombia threatens traditional backyard hen keeping, undermining women’s autonomy and increasing dependence on commercial inputs. However, everyday practices of care, intergenerational knowledge sharing and community cooperation help sustain alternative poultry systems, a form of resistance to industrialisation and an important source of women’s socioeconomic autonomy and community resilience.
  • Preserving Indigenous Peoples’ values and rights in food composition programmes: A call for agreed international guidelines. Food composition research can help broaden understanding of the nutritional value of Indigenous foods, but it also raises questions about who controls the knowledge and how it is used. Drawing on examples from First Nations in Canada, Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand, Sámi in Sápmi and Indigenous Peoples in Northeast India, the authors call for participatory approaches grounded in free, prior and informed consent, data sovereignty and access and benefit-sharing. The idea is to ensure that Indigenous Peoples, especially women, are recognised as rights-holders and active knowledge holders, rather than simply sources of information for scientific research.
  • To round things off, here’s a policy brief on Gender and Social Inclusion in Agrobiodiversity Conservation from the CBD Women’s Caucus and the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, aimed at the just-concluded COP17 of the CBD.
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Brainfood: WorldCuP, Crop origins, Abrahamic plants, UK landraces double, Ex situ change, Santorini vineyards, Apulian olives

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Africa gets behind genebanks

The African Union Commission organized a Seed Summit under the theme “Resilient Seed Systems for a Food Secure Africa”, hosted by the Kingdom of Eswatini from 5-7 October 2026.

The results are summarized in the Ezulwini Outcome Document, which includes the following:

Given the precarious state of many national genebanks, it’s really good to see the call to “strengthen and sustainably finance…” them “…in Member States.” Though I would have preferred to see that phrased as “…by Member States.”

The document is a ministerial outcome that I believe still has to go through AU policy organs for validation and endorsement, so nothing here is binding yet. It sets no funding figures, timelines or locations for the continental genebank, and it uses verbs like “support” and “request” rather than “establish.” Nevertheless, the recognition of the importance of genebanks is very welcome. We will keep a beady eye on how this develops.

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Nibbles: Bacon kitchen garden, Bison diversity, African herbaria, Mycorrhiza, China wild rice genebank, African seed laws

  1. Sir Nathaniel Bacon’s painting records the arrival of American crops in early modern England. And the cookmaid gets equal billing.
  2. North America’s bison survived near-extinction, but how much of its genetic diversity is left? Past and present DNA is helping reconstruct what was lost, with implications for how what remains is conserved and managed.
  3. China’s wild rice collection in Hainan now holds more than 15,000 samples. A genetic treasure trove, but its value ultimately depends on what breeders can make of it. Much like what’s left of bison diversity.
  4. Mycorrhizal fungi form vast underground networks that support plant life and store carbon. A new global map begins to show their extent, and just how much of this biodiversity remains overlooked.
  5. Africa’s herbaria hold centuries of botanical history, much of it still effectively invisible. Specimens can reveal shifting plant distributions and overlooked species. First, though, someone has to do the painstaking work of getting the data online.
  6. Africa has done painstaking work on seed laws, but getting good seed to farmers remains hard in practice. The gap between policy and delivery is stark, and commercial companies need to work alongside farmer-managed seed systems, not pretend they don’t exist.