AGRICULTURE: Food Negotiators seek Funding for Traditional Farming

By Pratap Chatterjee Reprint | | Print |

Pratap Chatterjee

ROME, Jul 7 1995 (IPS) - Farmers in Tegulet, Ethiopia, sowed new varieties of teff and sorghum last month, but they weren’t high- yield seeds bred in a laboratory. They were varieties the farmers had lost when they stopped planting them decades ago.

The seeds were brought to them from the national seed bank in Addis Ababa through a programme designed to restore ancient crops as well as traditional ways of saving the seed.

Next January, the Tegulet farmers will harvest the crops.

A small portion of the new seed will be set aside for future sowings. This seed will be stored in “gotteras” — traditional baskets made airtight by sealing the outside with manure — to be kept in local seedbanks that will be built this summer.

“We are trying to restore the ancient varieties to small farmers and help them store their seed cheaply and without chemicals. The local seed banks cost just 33,000 dollars,” says Mehari Zewdie of the Plant Genetic Resources Centre in Ethiopia.

“This technology costs much less than the expensive cold rooms that we have in Addis which need generators and special equipment to keep them at minus 18 degrees centigrade,” he adds.

Zewdie was in Rome for a meeting of the Commission on Plant Genetic Resources, a part of the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). Participants are considering ways to find money to increase the number of such seed restoration and preservation projects.

Projects like the one in Ethiopia are an example of a new initiative that agricultural policy-makers around the world call “farmer’s rights.” The policy-makers say that local farmers should be paid to protect rare varieties of crops, from alfalfa to zucchini.

The farmers rights concept originated in 1983 when agriculture ministers from around the world signed an agreement at the FAO to protect the rights of small farmers who have tended crops for centuries in countries from Sudan to Peru.

At the meeting here, the main agenda item was to bring the 1983 accord into line with the biodiversity convention signed at the 1992 Earth Summit in Brazil. Negotiators, who adjourned after two weeks of talks, must complete their work in time for a ministerial- level conference in Leipzig, Germany, next June.

The conference will also produce an inventory of the world’s plant genetic resources and lay out a plan of action to protect them from threats, such as disease and pestilence. Part of that plan will address how to fund “farmers rights” projects, such as the one in Ethiopia.

Most food crops have thousands of varieties. Potatoes, for example, come in as many as 5,000 varieties. Other crops, like rice, are believed to have more than 100,000 varieties, each of which have special properties.

Some rice varieties are good for growing in hills; others for lowlands. Some do best in tropical climates; other do better in drylands.

From the Toposa communities of Sudan to the Tanimuka and Yukuma communities of the Colombian Amazon, the seeds have often been preserved by local women. During the 1984 famine in Sudan, local women risked their lives to protect the seed for the following year’s planting.

Today, however, most crops are grown on large farms which ordinarily cultivate only one or two varieties of new, high- yielding seeds. As these new seeds have been introduced in many countries, local traditions have been slowly abandoned, and some have died out altogether.

Like eggs kept in only one basket, the new practices heighten the risk of losing an entire crop to a disease or pest. That was the situation which led to the Irish potato famine 150 years ago.

It was only by researching wild varieties in Peru, for example, that new disease-resistant potato crops were found to replace the varieties that had been grown in Ireland.

That is why governments and even commercial seed companies have an interest in preserving the diversity of global seed stocks.

The issue is a priority for many poor countries who want more funding for seed banks, local and international, to preserve traditional strains and to ensure their accessibility at low or no cost. They also want to gain support for new efforts to preserve traditional farming practices.

When its millet crop was recently threatened with striga weed infestation, Niger was advised by its neighbours to interplant the millet with sesame — a traditional practice that saved the crop.

“These techniques of local farmers have traditionally been shared in times of crisis, and this is what we need to protect,” says Henk Hobbelink, an activist with Global Resources Action International Network (GRAIN) in Barcelona, Spain.

Unfortunately, the 1983 accord, called the International Undertaking on Plant Genetic Resources, failed to spell out how these programmes would be funded. Apart from occasional projects, like the one in Ethiopia, little has been done.

The Ethiopian project was funded by the Washington-based Global Environment Facility (GEF), and negotiators here are hoping that the GEF will contribute more in the future. Donors have pledged two billion dollars to finance the GEF over the next three years.

But the GEF’s funding is increasingly in doubt, due to cuts in the U.S. contribution imposed by the Republican-led Congress. The other possible major source, the World Bank-based Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) faces a funding crisis of its own.