Barley – is a key cereal crop in Tigray region in Northern Ethiopia. Despite decades of public breeding, no new cultivars have been so far adopted by farmers. In this region, the usefulness of the Participatory Varietal Selection and Participatory Plant Breeding approach for identifying cultivars for drought prone areas and acceptable to resource-poor farmers has been demonstrated. A project is founded by NUFU (Norwegian program for Development, Research and Higher Education) from 2007 to 2011. This aims to improve productivity and food security through better access to quality seed in Tigray, using decentralized participatory breeding methods as a model for locally relevant research. The success of this project calls for farmer based seed multiplication where Local Seed Business was essential, as large commercial seed companies do not buy into truly local varieties, farmer-based seed multiplication and distribution is found to be important.

In line with this idea, in May 2009, stakeholders from federal, regional government and non-government organizations, higher learning institutions joined in an inception workshop to initiate Local Seed Business Project. The project is a joint effort of Bahir Dar University, Haramaya University, Hawassa University, Mekelle University, Oromia Agricultural Research Institute and Wageningen International. It is funded by the Dutch Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Food Quality. The project is coordinated by Dr. Fetien Abay. She is also the Principal investigator with Prof. Bjornstad of the barley breeding project. Her coordination gave an opportunity to create functional synergies between both projects. Commom project is operating within the period of 2009-2012 with the objective of promoting farmers to become self supporting and self employed in supplying their own seed within their locality using their own innovation and with less resources.

Combination of projects

The establishment of Local Seed Businesses is found to be an effective pathway to strengthen the link between the informal and formal seed systems and thereby contribute to seed security, enhance food security and moreover promote rural economic development in Tigray. The project is considered vital in enforcing seed supply and promoting the entrepreneur-ship of farmers’ communities. It is currently operating in Tigray region with six innovation sites. Through the MU programme on participatory barley breeding farmers were able to increase access to preferred genotypes. They also get technical helps in the production aspects: such as farm management, variety selection, harvesting and post harvesting. However they are not well equipped with the necessary capacities that enable them to operate their seed production independently. Farmers at almost all of the sites have a good local market for the seeds they are producing. But this is not created using business and marketing principles. All their efforts focus on having sufficient food to provide for the family first, thereafter they base their marketing strategies on surplus production.

The role of Women in the seed production

Women are 30% of the household heads in Tigray, with A highest proportion of 45%. It is because of the effect of war, being widows and separated families. In such kind of setting women have more responsibilities and work load. The Local Seed Business project recognises their presence and 20% of the members of the seed producer cooperatives are women. They are involved in decision making committees. A recent impact assessment indicates that women have performed a major role in varietal selection and dissemination.

Challenges: call for partnership

Machinery and equipment are critical in farm management, seed processing and storage. It is well documented that farmers have indigenous knowledge on how to produce seeds. However they do not have access to the technologies for seed processing and limited access to storage infrastructure. The prevailing credit system hinders many individual farmers who have no assets for collateral to use credit for seed production. It is because of access to credit in the district is accompanied on collateral basis. As a result, they depend only on the income received from selling of seeds as the main source of income for the seed production. To increase the quality in production and processing, their capacity to access improved technologies needs to be increased. This calls for a partnership in order to generate viable business so that farmers can also get more profitable, This kind of partnership is also expected to motivate the dropout secondary school students of the villages. Training can be given to those groups on how to handle and maintain the processing machine.