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| Access to Seed Index |
Seed is the most crucial input needed to achieve
food productivity and agricultural development in any country. Most of the
world food production is being carried out by smallholder farmers, to feed the
teeming world population, there is need to strengthen and improve smallholder
farmers’ access to quality seed varieties. It has been shown that farmers who
rely on informal sectors (where farmers selected and saved seeds from their own
fields for the next season or relied on seeds supplied by their community) for
their seed supply record low yield and productivity compared to those that
sourced theirs from formal sectors (Intensive seed production developed into a
specialized task, carried out by both small and large, often R&D seed
companies alongside public research institutes).
Smallholder farmers are responsible for 70% of
Africa’s food supply and an estimated 80% of the food consumed in Asia and
sub-Saharan Africa combined. In Latin America, smallholders farm almost 35% of
total cultivated land. Globally, there are approximately 2.5 billion people
involved in full- or part-time smallholder agriculture, managing an estimated
500 million small farms.
The seed companies either owned by Government or private
individuals/groups are needed produce viable and climate-resilient seed
varieties that will enable smallholder grow more and better food. Seed
companies can play a key role in developing suitable varieties and making
quality seeds available to smallholder farmers, helping to transform
agricultural systems and produce more in a sustainable way. According to Access to seed Index (2016), a billion people go to bed hungry every day and two
billion suffer from malnutrition. The global population is expected to grow by
a further two billion in the coming decades, precisely in those regions that
are currently considered food insecure. In these regions where agricultural systems
are dominated by smallholder farmers, access to the key inputs to produce more
and better food is often lacking. Quality seeds of improved varieties have
enabled farmers in advanced agricultural systems to triple their yields.
The Access to Seeds Index adopts Global Index that
compares global seed companies and a Regional Index that ranks regional and
national players. The strategy aims to increase access to seeds for smallholder
farmers and incorporates the following six dimensions: availability,
affordability, suitability, capability, profitability and autonomy. Access to
seed Index is being funded by the, Netherlands Ministry of Economic Affairs; Netherlands
Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Both
global and regional players are well positioned to contribute to smallholder
farmer development. Global companies have advanced R&D capacities, play a
pivotal role in shaping the market and can use their geographic spread to
transfer solutions that work in one region to other regions. The Index focuses
on companies with an integrated seed business model, covering the full seed value
chain, from R&D and production through distribution.
Access to seed index report reveals that, DuPont
Pioneer tops the Global Index of Field Crop Seed Companies, closely followed by
Syngenta and Bayer CropScience. East-West Seed clearly outperforms its peers in
the Global Index of Vegetable Seed Companies, again followed by Syngenta and
Bayer CropScience. East-West Seed also leads the Regional Index for Eastern
Africa, followed by a cluster of four companies that originate in the region: Victoria
Seeds, East African Seed, Kenya Seed Company and NASECO.