Seed aid sometimes fails to help farm output-study
01 May 2008 00:01:10 GMT Source: Reuters
By Alister Doyle, Environment Correspondent OSLO, May 1 (Reuters) - Emergency handouts of seeds to help farmers in developing nations plant new crops after drought, war or other disasters sometimes do more harm than good, a study showed on Thursday. The report, of seed aid given to 15 nations mainly in Africa since 1974, suggested that it was better to give farmers vouchers or money to buy seeds in local markets rather than send in seeds from elsewhere. "Widespread seed handouts can create a culture of dependency, undermine local markets and compromise local diversity of staple crops, especially by giving exaggerated emphasis to maize," it said. World prices for foods from rice to wheat have risen sharply this year, adding urgency to an overhaul of policies meant to raise farm output in developing nations. "In some cases seed aid is not a good use of money -- the seeds end up in cooking pots, the farmers plant their own seeds," said Louise Sperling, the lead author of the report at the International Center for Tropical Agriculture. After the slaughter of 800,000 ethnic Tutsis and moderate Hutus in Rwanda in 1994, she said that massive amounts of seed aid went largely unused. "When we looked at what farmers planted, most of the seed they chose to plant came from the local systems," she told Reuters. The same happened in Kenya after a 1997 drought and in Honduras after Hurricane Mitch in 1999. SEEDS, NO FOOD Donors wrongly assumed that there were too few seeds for planting new crops whenever food was in short supply, it said. "There are often seeds available in the local markets. We often overestimate the problem," she said. For sorghum, for instance, "you can lose 95 percent of the harvest and still have enough seed for planting because the amount you need is relatively small...There tends to be much more seed available than we think." Seed aid, first used in the 1920s and 1930s in the Great Depression in the United States and then in the Ethiopian famine of the mid-1970s, has become a routine part of donor policies since the late 1980s, the study said. The research, published in the Journal of Development Studies, would be discussed at a conference in Oslo on May 14. Seed aid projects from 2004-07 cost $107 million, according to a report by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organisation. Sperling said that other estimates put seed aid at 2-3 percent of the amount spent on emergency food aid. Handing out money or vouchers for farmers to buy seeds in local markets could be a better way of helping. And it would generate money for the local economy -- whereas money linked to seed aid often goes to distant suppliers. Sperling said farmers may have to get used to trying new seeds because of climate change that could bring more storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves. -- For Reuters latest environment blogs click on: http://blogs.reuters.com/environment/ (edited by Richard Meares)
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