Varieties on paper: Are varieties in national catalogs available to African farmers?

Résumé fourni par la source

National variety catalogs provide a list of officially registered crop varieties for use by farmers. Most African countries permit only the commercial seed production of registered varieties. At the same time, imported varieties are often exempt from mandatory registration, creating an unequal playing field between imported and locally-produced seeds. This particularly affects vegetable seeds, which, being of high value and low volume, are easily imported. This study provides an in-depth analysis of this problem by quantifying the number of registered vegetable varieties available to farmers and the proportion of these varieties that are actually registered. Data come from national variety catalogs of African countries, complemented with primary data collected through a survey of 560 agrodealers in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Mali, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, and Ethiopia. Out of 54 African countries, 40 were confirmed to have variety catalogs. Of these, 15 were publicly available online, 12 were shared by the national seed authority upon request, while we were unable to obtain 13 catalogs despite several attempts. Cereal crops dominate the 27 national catalogs we analyzed, and most countries had few or no vegetable varieties registered despite the high diversity of this crop group. Where vegetables were included in the catalog, these were mostly varieties of tomato, pepper, onion, and eggplant rather than traditional African vegetables. The agrodealer data show that only 2.6% of registered vegetable varieties were available in the market, with 40% of agrodealers not selling any registered vegetable varieties. These results show that national registration systems do not play a significant role in making improved vegetable varieties available to farmers in Africa. We propose a system of voluntary online registration for both locally produced and imported seed.

Ce résumé expose les affirmations des auteurs. BNTIC ne l’interprète pas comme une validation indépendante des résultats.