Sowing seeds of security : a multilevel perspective on the governance of plant genetic resources and seed systems in Ethiopia

Farmers’ and breeders’ access to diverse cultivated and wild plant genetic resources for food and agriculture (PGRFA) is crucial for adapting crop production to climate, environmental, and socioeconomic changes and increasing food and nutrition security. This thesis comprises three separate but interrelated articles that contribute to the literature on PGRFA governance, seed security and seed systems, and seed politics and development. At the intersection of the national and international levels, the thesis aims to understand Ethiopia’s PGRFA access governance and its implications for different users within and outside the country. At the intersection of the local and the national levels, it investigates farmers’ seed preferences and uses and how different seed system actors, institutions, and policies affect farmers’ seed security. Finally, crosscutting all levels, the thesis sheds light on the current Ethiopian seed system development politics by exploring how and why the Ethiopian government prioritized some seed system policies and excluded other policies under different political regimes since the 1950s. In the first article, focusing on genetic resource governance, we show that Ethiopia’s PGRFA access governance since the early 1990s has shifted from a commons and free access regime to a sovereign ownership and control regime restricting access for international users. Drawing on commons theory, we identify three interlinked historical, political, and economic factors that can explain this development: the economic importance of agriculture, the national narratives about the value of PGRFA, and Ethiopian policy makers’ participation in the heated ‘seed wars’ on the international scene. The second article focuses on farmers’ seed preferences and uses at the farm level and relates this to local and national seed system governance. The farm-level research reports evidence of widespread seed insecurity in the study sites, apparent in discrepancies between the plant varieties and types of seeds farmers prefer and those they actually use. Other evidence includes limited availability of improved varieties and specially certified seeds, challenges with seed quality from some sources, and differentiated access to preferred seed and information according to sex, age, and wealth. Analysis of seed system governance shows that the interventions prioritized in Ethiopia’s current pluralistic seed system development strategy (PSSDS) on paper address most of these identified seed insecurity issues and seed system dysfunctions, but implementation lags. The third and final article in the thesis provides a historical analysis of Ethiopia’s seed policy over the last 70 years. Focusing on power and employing the lens of ‘international seed regimes,’ the article shows that Ethiopia has gone from almost non-participation in the first colonial seed regime to becoming the “pioneer” of the post-WWII second public seed regime in the horn of Africa and finally to resistance to the third corporate-based neoliberal seed regime. In the current conjuncture in the contemporary Ethiopian seed regime, four different approaches to PSSDS are competing: 1) government-led formalization, 2) private-led formalization, 3) farmer-based localization, and 4) community-based integrative seed system developments. Despite the overarching policies recognizing the need for a pluralistic approach to seed system development to respond to farmers’ seed security challenges, government programs and practices continue to emphasize state-led seed system formalization rooted in the earlier second seed regime. The government’s vision to modernize smallholder farmers and increase crop production and productivity and the focus on formal seed systems development as the primary pathway to achieve these have ignored opportunities to tap into the strength of other alternatives identified in Ethiopia’s PSSDS. In conclusion, the research presented in this thesis shows that PSSDS is a comprehensive policy framework with the potential to deliver seed security for all farmers. However, this will require the government to take leadership and remove existing political, organizational, and economic barriers in order to implement a genuinely inclusive and equitable pluralistic seed system