Strengthening community seed banks for gender inclusive development in India

Abstract

Smallholder women and men farmers in India use diverse social networks to access seeds of their choice and related information. Women largely depend on informal seed systems, also referred to as farmer managed or community seed systems. However, with changing agrarian relations, the informal seed systems are facing challenges in ensuring equitable access to traditional and community-preferred landraces or varieties through informal social networks, connections and exchange. At the field level, these changes adversely impact women and marginal farmers’ access to preferred crops and varieties/ landraces, household gender relations, food and nutrition security, dietary diversity, food system resilience and livelihoods. To fill this gap in the informal seed systems, the Community Seed Banks (CSBs) model has been promoted as a strategy to strengthen and ensure access to traditional varieties of different crops, specifically neglected and under-utilized crop species and build seed-saving capacity at the local level (Vernooy et al. 2014 and 2022).