Community Seed Banks - A Practical Guide for Small-scale Farmers

ESAFF Uganda (2022). Community Seed Banks, A practical Guide for Small-scale Farmers.

This guide was developed to provide comprehensive, easy to use guidelines for small scale farmers who are interested in establishing a community seed bank. The guide collects information and experiences from different documents developed by other key stakeholders like Bioversity International, Food and Agriculture Organization(FAO), OXFAM(SD=HS) among others. Most importantly, the guide collects experiences from small scale farmers who have been saving seed over a long period of time as well as setting up of community seed banks in their communities.

Seed is the primary source of all food and agricultural production. On-farm seed practices have been responsible for managing, conserving, and renewing genetic diversity in agriculture. Today, the seed sector is divided into two major systems: the formal and informal seed systems. However, the “Informal” seed sector has remained influential in terms of the numbers of small-scale farmers using and depending on it. While the formal seed sector, enforced by public and private law and corporate interests, is dominant and tends to marginalize and rule out the informal system, the traditional system creates microeconomic dependencies for farmers, despite not being able to develop sufficient crop diversity and adapted varieties to answer all local demands of farmers and consumers. As a result, the need for Community Seed Banking (CSBs) as part of farmer managed seed systems was founded.