Community seed banks are places where seeds are stored primarily to share, through seed swaps or other events
Sifelani Tsiko Syndication Writer
A local NGO is scaling up the construction of community seed banks in various rural districts to conserve local crop breeds and varieties critical for the survival of the country’s indigenous food crop resources.Community Technology Development Trust (CTDT) director, Andrew Mushita, told Zimpapers Syndication that his organisation is now building four more community seed banks in Mount Darwin, Rushinga, Matobo and Mudzi to provide support to local communities which are playing a big role by preserving small grains and other indigenous crop varieties to enhance food security and their livelihoods.
The veteran agronomist and development expert says recurrent droughts have put the country’s agricultural diversity at risk, a problem compounded by farmers in some areas abandoning their local varieties for new, high-yield, commercial seeds.
“Community seed banks are vital for our country and offer the chance to conserve genetic diversity at the level of local farmers,” he said.
“Such centres serve as a grain reserve in times of crisis or droughts. We need to build more community seed banks which act as a platform for saving and promoting the exchange of neglected grains.”
The Harare-based NGO built three community seed banks in Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe, Chiredzi and Tsholotsho districts.
These are still operational and local communities are running them with minimal support from CTDT.
Community seed banks are places where seeds are stored primarily to share, through seed swaps or other events.
Farmers often donate seed to the community bank after a good harvest. When they don’t have enough seed for planting, they borrow from the seed bank.
When they grow plants in a season, they can return back the seed plus an interest (seed form) to help grow seed stocks in the community bank.
Seeds are at the heart of agriculture and smallholder farmers plagued with hunger, poverty and insecurity can use seed banks to source seed at a lower cost.
At a community seed bank, farmers set up sustainable and multipliable open-source systems to share and store seeds, using traditional knowledge along with new concepts and technology.
Experts say the enterprise operates like a bank, only with less bureaucracy.
A farmer can “withdraw” a kilo of seed and has to repay the loan with one-and-a-half to two kilos of seed after harvest.
“We intend to build five more community seed banks in Murehwa, Goromonzi, Chipinge and Chegutu districts,” said Mushita.
“We think that there should be at least one community seed bank in each district.”
At Chibika Community Seed Bank in UMP, the seed store has a small dark and cool room lined with rows of neatly-labelled earthen pots and stoppered glass bottles, all of them filled with varieties of millets, indigenous maize varieties, finger (okra), pumpkin, cowpeas and whole range of indigenous crop seeds.
Farmers in this area are becoming part of a thriving and sustainable community that is conserving Zimbabwe’s indigenous seed heritage and protecting its food sovereignty at a time when indigenous crop varieties are rapidly disappearing.
Mushita said it was important to increase the collections of traditional crop varieties and wild species as more varieties were being lost through genetic erosion.
He said the major reasons his organisation was involved in the construction of community seed banks, was the need to promote the sustainable use and conservation of the national agricultural biodiversity, to empower communities to manage and derive economic benefits from the local materials.
In addition, he said, the move also sought to increase agricultural productivity, increase food and nutrition security of smallholder farmers.
The other aspects, he said, relate to access to good quality seed, cost effectiveness of the seed, ownership and control of the means of production by farmers.
“This will build farmer’s capacity to save, exchange and share knowledge on local seed management,” Mushita said. “The other key component is the ability of farmers to practice crop diversification as a strategy to increase resilience in the face of climate change.”
The veteran agronomist estimates the cost of constructing a new community seed bank at USD$20 000 but community contribution in terms of moulding bricks and gathering all local materials can significantly reduce cost.
“This requires coordination and supply of water and the provision of water sometimes is challenging. Other than effective water supply all is not that difficult,” he said.
CTDT is working closely with Oxfam Novib, Swedish SIDA and HIVOS of the Netherlands to build the community seed banks.
“I think the Government should support local authorities to build community seed banks in their districts and compliment the same with increased budgetary support to the national gene bank which should coordinate the construction and national germplasm collections countrywide,” Mushita said.
A community seed bank is a place where seeds are available for community members to share.
CTDT is also stepping up efforts to promote farmer seed exchanges.
“We have registered a seed company — Champion Seed Company — to spearhead trade and exchange of seed by smallholder farmers,” Mushita said. “We are negotiating with the Government to create laws that allow farmers to trade their own seed.”
Most traditional varieties and other wild species are being lost through genetic erosion, as farmers adopt new varieties and cease growing the varieties that they have nurtured for generations.
Eventually, they lose these varieties leaving most crop and wild species threatened with extinction, as their habitats are destroyed by human disturbance.
CTDT and other partners are working to ensure the long-term preservation of crop seed biodiversity, as a part of the regional and global strategy for the conservation of crop genetic resources.
Agricultural experts say fewer crop species are feeding the world than 50 years ago – raising concerns about the resilience of the global food system.
They warn that loss of diversity meant more people were dependent on key crops, leaving them more exposed to harvest failures.
Higher consumption of energy-dense crops could also contribute to a global rise in heart disease and diabetes, they added.
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the diversity of cultivated crops declined by 75 percent during the 20th Century and a third of today’s diversity could disappear by 2050.
Zimbabwe and most other African countries too, are losing plant genetic material.
Experts say plant genetic materials facing extinction in the region included labour — intensive crops such bambara, green gram, sesame, round potato (Zulu potato) and a wide range of indigenous maize, sorghum and millet varieties.
Agricultural experts say the world’s agro-biodiversity is disappearing at an alarming rate and for several major crops, up to 80 — 90 percent losses in variety over the past century have been reported.
Zimbabwe has lost a number of local crop varieties due to neglect, erosion of local indigenous knowledge systems, promotion of improved varieties, lack of incentives for locally adapted crops and recognition of the keepers of crop diversity among other factors.
Said Mushita: “There is a need to save indigenous variety of seeds which are on the brink of extinction as they are facing a stiff competition from hybrid variety of seeds.
“Building more community seed banks is one way of arresting this tragic and worrying trend — loss of plant materials.”
Seed collections start at the community seed bank before there are moved to the Genetic Resources and Biotechnology Institute (formerly the National Gene Bank of Zimbabwe) and the SADC Plant Genetic Resource Centre in Zambia which sends them to the global seed vault, which opened on the Svalbard archipelago between Norway and the North Pole in 2008.
The global seed vault protects a diverse range of crop seed such as beans, rice, maize, and wheat against the worst cataclysms of nuclear war or disease.
The SADC Plant Genetic Resource Centre now holds more than 18 000 diverse crop and wild relative accessions as the bloc steps up long-term efforts to conserve germplasm collections and to deal with problems caused by a changing and unpredictable climate.
The Svalbard global seed vault has more than 860 000 samples, from almost all nations.
It is supported with materials from about 1 700 seed banks around the world which conserve over 7 million seed samples, some of which are rare and unique to particular regions.
If anything goes wrong in any of these facilities, diversity could be lost. To insure against this possibility, seeds from all over the world are sent to Svalbard for long-term storage.
The seeds within the Svalbard Global Seed Vault are copies of seed samples stored in the other seed banks.
The vault owns and operates the facility while the depositing banks own the collections they deposit.