Research led by Louise Sperling of the Seed Systems Under Stress Program finds that stressed communities usually need seed imports less than help in restoring farmers' ability to buy and use locally available seed

Donating seeds is one of many forms of aid offered to farm communities under stress. More unusual is to offer seed system relief and, even more unusual, to study the effectiveness of such relief. This is what the Seed Systems Under Stress Program does in Africa, where most seed aid is sent. The program is a broad-based, fluid coalition whose members aim to improve the effectiveness of seed-related responses to disaster. They see seed systems as central to smallholder agriculture and seed aid as key to supporting it.

At the program's core is a 10-year partnership for innovation in seed aid of the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), Catholic Relief Services (CRS) and their partners, including nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), United Nations (UN) agencies, and African regional bodies and national agricultural research systems (NARS). It is funded principally by two impact-oriented donors: the Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance (OFDA) of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the International Development Research Centre (IDRC) in Canada.

UN organizations such as the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) play significant roles in convincing NARS and governments to expand their perspectives on seed aid.

"In 2003, through extensive collaborative efforts, the UN's Guiding Principles for Seed Relief were substantially modified," relates Louise Sperling, who represents CIAT in the Seed Systems Under Stress Program. She adds that these changes were the result of several mutually reinforcing synergies: "our own research, which honed technical and social insights; the NGOs' wide experience on the ground to shape practice; and the UN's normative clout for promoting better practice."

Sperling describes the program as "certainly having its intellectual origins in the CGIAR's Seeds of Hope work," referring to a pioneering project the CGIAR implemented in response to Rwanda's genocide and civil war of 1994. It helped define the role of research organizations in restoring germplasm, seed systems and research capacity to countries that have suffered cataclysms.

"Conditions were often challenging," recalls Sperling, who led the program's assessment of the effects of the war on farmers and farming systems. "Roads were mined, people were understandably suspicious, and tempers were high. At one point, several of my interviewers were severely harassed by soldiers. It was very hard interviewing people who had lost their land, their loved ones and sometimes even their limbs."

Louise Sperling

A United States citizen born and raised in New York State, Louise Sperling won a Fulbright-Hays Fellowship to teach and do underwater archaeology in southern France. She then worked as a paleontologist in Ethiopia, focusing on the Afar region, where she became aware of the problems suffered by pastoral societies. "This was when I first began moving away from studying human and animal populations who had died 50,000 to 5 million years ago toward studying present ones," Sperling says.

She did her PhD fieldwork during 24 months spent with the Samburu of northern Kenya between 1983 and 1985, during one of its worst droughts in history. These cousins of the Maasai lost 75% of their cattle and many of their sheep and had to sell off their goats.

"For an outsider, the process looked much worse than a stock market crash," recalls Sperling. "One's assets - the livestock - weakened and shrank before one's eyes, day by day, and then week by week." The experience taught Sperling what water stress entails in human terms, as well as at the level of economics and natural resource management, and how some aspects could be combated while others could not be.

Sperling completed her studies at Wesleyan University, State University of New York at Binghamton and McGill University .

"Although I studied development anthropology or economic anthropology," she comments, "I now work more like a social scientist than as an anthropologist. Moreover, I work so closely with plant breeders, plant pathologists and agronomists that my own work looks more like a hybrid of disciplines. Real anthropologists would disown me!"

Sperling first joined CIAT on a Rockefeller postdoctorate fellowship, becoming a member of the multidisciplinary African Great Lakes team, for which she initiated a novel program on participatory plant breeding.

" Rwanda was such a logical place to work closely with farmers," she explains. "Women bean farmers know a great deal about managing beans and targeting bean mixtures according to diverse growing conditions, whether poor soils, richer soils or sowing under stands of banana." Noting that about 1,500 phenotypes can be found throughout the country, she adds that "a Rwandan woman may test perhaps 100 bean varieties during her life. She really sees beans."

Both the Rwanda research system and the CIAT team were highly geared towards impact. "We didn't want just academic results," Sperling stresses. "We wanted real results on the ground. Hence, the team was willing to take clients' views seriously, to decentralize the trials to real farming conditions, and to give farmers reasonably quick access to the germplasm they wanted and needed."

Sperling had moved to India before the outbreak of the Rwandan civil war, during which, she says, "I lost many, many, many friends." She returned after the war to lead the CGIAR team that conducted the diagnostic work for the Seeds of Hope Program.

Commenting on the Seed Systems Under Stress Program, Sperling emphasizes that it "is not focused on seed aid per se, but on strengthening seed systems that are under stress, in both the short and long term." If seed-aid providers were to evaluate an afflicted region's seed systems, they may discover that seed as such is not needed and that the more urgent needs are supplies of drought-tolerant varieties, diversification into agroenterprise, helping farmers adopt livelihoods other than agriculture, or changing water and soil management practices.

"But," she warns, "finding an effective approach means understanding how seed systems function and why farmers might prefer different crops and varieties, or source seed from a range of channels."

Sperling describes a community's seed system as the way "in which seed is produced, multiplied and distributed," which usually comprises a complex of formal and informal channels - as well as relief. Each provides for distinct sets of crops and varieties, the seed for which differ in quality, cost and ability to match farmers' growing conditions and preferences. Seed must be acceptable to farmers who, as Sperling points out, "have their own incredibly rigorous standards as to what the right seed may be."

"So, seed security is not the same thing as food security," Sperling stresses, adding that, in an emergency, the informal seed system is usually highly functional, providing sufficient seeds for planting, but that people in stressed communities have often lost their assets and so are unable to buy locally available seed for planting. "Hence, the problem becomes one of enabling stressed communities to access needed seed types. This can be done, for example, by providing cash or vouchers to stressed farmers so they can obtain the seed already available on local markets, or sometimes in aid-organized seed fairs.

"Indeed, perhaps one of the most surprising findings that the program made was to discover how resilient an informal seed system could be," she adds, explaining that, even as harvests diminish dramatically, enough seed often remains available within a region for planting the next crop. "We found over and over again that bringing seed in from outside often just isn't necessary - that it may even be counterproductive by diverting retail trade and affecting prices in local markets."

In contrast, formal systems can be vulnerable, particularly during periods of civil strife. Likewise, the diversity of local varieties is often maintained during disasters, while new varieties may be lost, especially if supplies have not been sufficiently integrated into the routine functioning of local seed channels.

The program showed, in short, that seed-related problems in crises are not so much the lack of seed - be it grain, cuttings, tubers or other planting materials - but more the lack of access to that seed because farmers cannot afford it as a result of the crisis or the breakdown of social networks. Farmers often do not seem to need outside relief seed. Follow-up studies in on the reconstruction of Afghanistan, the Rwandan war and droughts in Kenya show such relief to contribute less than one-eighth of the total seed sown.

The program's findings influenced OFDA - itself a major donor of seed aid - to become, according to Sperling, the major change agent for seed aid. It encourages seed-aid providers to first assess seed security under stressed situations and so develop targeted approaches to alleviating problems instead of merely delivering seed as the default response. IDRC and OFDA have also encouraged assessments of the effectiveness of seed aid that is repeated over long periods. With funds from both donors, Ethiopian NARS are working towards breaking a 24-year, on-and-off cycle of receiving seed aid.

Sperling concludes that seed-aid providers need to appreciate that relief seed is not effectively used when it is treated as a "logistic exercise, narrowly focusing on transporting seed as an input. Instead, seed security must be assessed, farmers' needs understood and strategies developed to strengthen seed systems."