The social institutions of informal seed systems in Sahelian West Africa emphasize sharing within families and communities, and economic arrangements that are negotiated in local marketplaces. In contrast, market-oriented agricultural development proposes a new set of social institutions for formal seed systems, designed to build value chains that facilitate market access to improved varieties of seeds. Much of the description by farmers of their experiences with the new social institutions and interactions do or do not support access to improved varieties, often by comparing new standardized market exchanges to existing social institutions that provide access to different types of seeds. Farmers’ and communities’ experiences with farmer organizations and agrodealers in particular, as well as their observations of if and how these new institutions connect to those that constitute informal seed systems, suggest that the impacts of market-oriented seed system development vary by individual and by type of institution.
Does the establishment of social institutions that constitute formal market-oriented seed systems support farmers’ access to seeds?
The social institutions, including farmer organizations, agrodealers, and seed enterprises, that constitute formal market-oriented seed systems are based on a cash economy and standardized economic exchanges of seeds. As farmers experience the new institutions for seed sales as reliable and consistent, many are increasingly interested in formal exchanges as an additional means of buffering against the risks associated with other social institutions like seed sharing and saving. ‘In the past, accessing seeds, it was a little complicated. Because if a farmer had seeds, when you asked, he could tell you to wait until he was done with the seeds, and then he’d give to you. But now, there are sales. You can buy directly, and you won’t take time’. For some farmers, the knowledge that formal exchanges are an increasingly reliable seed access option means that they have stopped saving seed, ‘because they know that when you need seeds, you can find them with [the farmer organization]’. Other farmers see seed sales as a complement to, rather than a replacement for, seed saving: ‘She said that she saved a little, and if we don’t bring any more, she will plant what she saved’. The major pressure on all social institutions that support seed access, both formal and informal, is the demand of household food needs and the consistent risk that they will not be met. In this way, the presence of standardized seed sales helps buffer against the possibility that a household cannot save seeds because ‘during the harvest, there wasn’t enough grain, so they just started eating it’. Seed sharing is also difficult because, as one woman in Mali explained, ‘she can’t save part as seeds, and give them. She also has to eat’. The certainty of formal seed sales, then, can complement the access options available in informal seed systems, and can provide community-level seed security, albeit a conditional security, as formal economic exchanges require always-scarce cash.
The expansion of social institutions that support formal seed systems has also challenged seed sharing arrangements, when the logic of economic exchange begins to supplant other social priorities: ‘people asked [for seeds] and she said that they aren’t aid, to give to someone … since she invested money in them, they should buy also’. As one woman in Burkina Faso noted, ‘What she’s noticed is that there are people who refuse to give seeds for free … if you want them as gifts, there are people who refuse them, they say they aren’t seeds. When you give money, you will have something’. Similarly, some farmers have experienced a change in terms of sharing now that seeds are available for sale: ‘before, there was solidarity. People gave seeds, and others exchanged. But now you have to pay’. The cash element of formal economic exchanges presents a challenge in rural areas with little consistent opportunity to earn cash. As the value chains for formal seed systems expand and become increasingly institutionalized at every step of the way, many seed producers who work for farmer organizations report no longer giving or selling seeds directly from their fields, instead sending people to the farmer organization’s shop so that the shop can ‘get more clients and benefit, to attract others’. For the most part, however, farmers in the Sahel increasingly express a dynamic calculation that supports access to seeds through multiple social institutions. A man in Niger sums it up well: ‘now there is really a chance, in terms of access to seeds. We can find them here in the shop. If someone doesn’t go to the shop, you can find them also with a relative who grew them last year, to get them and replant. There is diffusion’.
By engaging with multiple types of social institutions to access seeds, farmers in contemporary Sahelian seed systems have access to multiple types of seeds. Currently, improved varieties originate almost entirely from local farmer organizations and extra-local institutions that include agrodealers and the seed enterprises for which they work, and seed sales have begun to define types of seeds for some farmers: ‘for local varieties, when you want to plant, you bring a quantity to exchange with the variety that you want. And she said that for improved varieties, you pay’. For other farmers, the place a seed was accessed might define the type of seed it is. For landraces, ‘they are with relatives, always with relatives or friends’. Improved varieties, on the other hand, are bought ‘with the [agrodealer or farmer organization] shop, and in a packet, with information, they explain all of the characteristics’. The linkage between how a seed is accessed and the type of seed is not firm, however, as the formal seed system institutions also link to the informal seed system institutions that create access through seed sharing and seed saving. As one woman in Mali explained, ‘[the farmer organization] has to stock seeds so that more people can use them. They will plant, and then someone else can ask to try them, and seeds will be diffused. Mostly by exchange’. Many seed producers report that they sell and exchange what are effectively socially certified seeds (with their traits “certified” based on trust) to family and neighbors outside of the institutions of formal seed systems. As one man in Burkina Faso explained, ‘Since it is family, it’s among us. Sometimes we do exchanges. You bring one or two bot [local measure], and then I give you two bots. Because people don’t have the money to buy. If your brother comes and says, I want that variety, you have to exchange’.
Do individual farmers and rural communities engage with both formal market-oriented seed systems and informal seed systems?
Discussing farmer organizations as local social institutions, some people voiced appreciation for farmer organizations’ efforts in seed dissemination, in contrast to previous experiences with development projects that ‘created access. And sometime they brought [seeds] late. With local organizations, there are people in the union who hear him’, and so specific requests or needs are more likely to be incorporated into the seed system. Village groups, which are generally affiliated with farmer organizations, provide even stronger social networks from which to learn and innovate. One woman in Niger explained that now that there is a village group, ‘they have a line, they are informed of new varieties. All about agriculture, they have networks to get information’. The line is not to an outside entity, but to the local input shops, other farmers’ fields, and most importantly, shared experience. As social institutions, farmer organizations can create a space for social learning and seed exchanges by supporting field trials, training, and the local production of improved variety seeds.
In describing their appreciation for seed sales by both farmer organizations and agrodealers in local marketplaces, many farmers make the connection between the spatial organization of market-oriented institutions and their relevance to local seed systems. In the past, a farmer might have ‘heard seeds talked about, but he had never come across them here’. Instead, to access improved varieties and sometimes even landraces, ‘you had to go to town to find them, pay the cost of transport’. Now, however, with the institution of localized points of sale, ‘if you need seeds, you don’t have to travel’. Seed sales in local markets allow individuals to observe and make their own seed choices: ‘if you go to the market, you pass by and see that people are really interested in this variety. That’s why he was motivated also to buy them’. However, many farmers still prefer to receive information from a known source before making decisions about new seeds, and it is here that agrodealers and the seed enterprises they represent are seen as a less trusted source of information than local farmer organizations. ‘In the past, information came with the agrodealers, but when you put them with a farmer organization, others will be informed by the radio, and those can buy who are in villages that are around’. Although they both provide access to the formal seed system through seed sales, farmer organizations are both more local and more dynamic social institutions than agrodealers, who are generally seen as solely market actors that exist outside the local milieu. Particularly for women, the local integration of farmer organization representatives creates a bridge to the formal seed system that would not exist through impersonal agrodealers. As a woman in Niger explained, ‘Now that there are sales, they don’t sell them at a price that the women like. So she gives her money to the [farmer organization] agent, and that’s who buys her the variety that she plants’.
As farmers and communities have observed and experienced the development of the social institutions associated with formal market-oriented seed systems, they have begun to engage with them in ways that fit their local social context, creating linkages between the systems through both existing and new social institutions. Maps of local seed systems drawn at the village level capture a visual representation of the social institutions that constitute both informal and formal seed systems in a given research site.
Figure 1 presents two such maps drawn by residents of two villages in the Dedougou region of Burkina Faso.
The two maps presented in
Fig. 1 depict two different but related aspects of the spatial configuration of contemporary seed systems in the Dedougou research site. The map in panel A shows the social institutions and relationships among them in the newly created formal seed system. The value chain flows in linear fashion from the national agricultural research station in the upper right-hand corner, where new improved varieties are developed, to the farmer organization headquarters in the regional city, Dedougou, where improved variety seeds are sent for certification and packaging. Seeds are then brought to a central village by the local farmer organization representative who lives in the village, and individuals from the villages at the top and bottom of the map come there to buy seeds.
Farmers also noted that there are seed producers in the surrounding villages who sell uncertified improved varieties straight from their fields, creating a linkage point between the formal and informal seed systems. While drawing the map in panel B, farmers in a different village in the region told the story of seed movement from the beginning of the season to planting time. The store in lower left-hand corner of the map is a shop run by someone local from the farmer organization. If one person went to get seeds, he would bring them back to the village and call other people together (the group seen in the upper center of the map) to tell them about the seeds and give them some. If his wife asked for some seeds, he would give her a little bit to try in her field. Then the farmer would plant them in his field, at the right. At the end of the season, he would bring some seeds back to the village and save them for next year. If he had some that met the certification requirements, he would also take some to the farmer organization headquarters to sell as seed the following year.
These two maps and their descriptions represent two different ways that improved variety seeds are accessed through the social institutions that constitute the newly established formal seed systems, and how those seeds are then further accessed and changed through the engagement of the social institutions that make up informal seed systems. In both maps, the initial infusion of improved variety seeds comes from an extra-local social institution, an agrodealer shop, or a farmer organization representative. The seed then becomes informal and local in both access and genetic makeup, as it is saved and circulated within and among villages over multiple years. Social institutions that constitute informal seed systems, including uncertified seed sales, seed banks, and kinship ties, facilitate this movement and change in the characteristics of seed access and seed type. Farmer organization members, as both seed producers and seed sellers, are the primary point of overlap and interconnection between the seed systems. The result is an interconnection of formal and informal seed systems based on varied local values and realities, rather than the dominance of a single formal seed value chain with linear movement of seeds each year (as is the goal of market-oriented agricultural development).
The maps presented in
Fig. 1 are the result of village-level discussions about seed systems and how farmers are engaging with the new formal seed systems being established in Sahelian West Africa. The maps presented in
Fig. 2 draw on results from the full sample of farmers who accessed improved variety seeds from 2010 to 2012 through purchases, exchanges, and saving. The Dedougou, Burkina Faso region is compared with the Dioila, Mali region, to highlight the similarities and differences in how the institutions that constitute the formal and informal seed systems in each region are integrated and impacting overall seed access.
The two maps presented in
Fig. 2 provide a visual representation of the social institutions that constitute formal and informal seed systems in contemporary Sahelian West Africa, and how their spatial integration does or does not facilitate different types of access to improved variety seeds. The maps of seed movement in both the Dedougou region of Burkina Faso and the Dioila region of Mali reflect the same themes seen in the two hand-drawn maps presented in
Fig. 1. Farmer organization representatives are integral to the movement of improved variety seeds from the regional headquarters into their own villages and villages directly surrounding their own. The radial pattern of seed sales in the maps in
Fig. 2 depicts the linear value chains that are characteristic of the formal market-oriented seed systems currently being established in each region. In addition, the points of integration between the formal and informal seed systems, described and depicted in panel B of
Fig. 1, are also clearly visualized in the maps in
Fig. 2. In almost every village to which seeds were sold in both Burkina Faso and Mali farmers reported saving those seeds for use the following year, and in most villages to which seeds were sold farmers report sharing seeds the following year with others in their own villages or even further afield. Seed sharing includes exchange and gifts of seed that could have been sold back to the farmer organization to be certified for further sale in the formal seed value chain, but that farmers chose to exchange for cash or in-kind outside the formal seed system.
The maps in
Fig. 2 also highlight some differences between the two types of research sites. The agrodealer program that supports small private input dealers and links them to national-level private seed enterprises is much better developed in Mali than it is in Burkina Faso, and many agrodealers exist in the Diola region of Mali but none are present in the Dedougou region of Burkina Faso. The map of seed movement in Diola highlights a potential impact of agrodealers on the integration of the formal and informal seed systems. In several villages where both agrodealers and farmer organization representatives are based (usually villages that host a weekly market day), there are no reports from farmers of sharing seeds with others the following year. Many farmers who access improved variety seeds by purchasing them in one of these villages did, however, report saving seeds for their own use for the following year. The increased commercialization of seeds sales in Mali due to the presence of agrodealers in the same areas as farmer organizations that also sell seeds possibly explains the lack of seed sharing in Diola as compared with the Dedougou region of Mali. There is less need for integration between the formal and informal seed systems, as there is more opportunity to purchase seeds each year in the Dioila region because of the more diversified and established formal value chain. In addition, as more farmers experience the standardized social institutions that constitute the formal seed system, particularly embodied in the prices and relationships to extra-local seed enterprise that agrodealers bring to local markets, the less likely they are to see those institutions as compatible with those of the informal seed system.