Laws and regulations enabling and restricting Africa’s vegetable seed sector

ABSTRACT

Farmers in sub-Saharan Africa do not have much choice of quality seed of vegetable cultivars adapted to local growing conditions and consumer demand. Only a handful of vegetable seed companies invest in local breeding research, while nearly all rely on seed imports. Our objective was to analyse to what extent existing seed laws and regulations enable or restrict the development of a research-based vegetable seed sector in Africa. Using a regulatory value chain approach, we analysed written laws and regulations for 13 countries and interviewed private and public sector stakeholders. We generally find that countries have taken a government-centred approach to seed quality control without recognizing that government agencies have little capacity to do this properly for vegetable crops. Mandatory Value for Cultivation and Use (VCU) trials and state-controlled seed certification are the two examples of regulatory approaches that may work for cereals but are not well suited for vegetables. No country has vegetable breeding as a goal in their national seed policy, and only four set out specific objectives for the vegetable seed sector. Tailoring seed policies, laws and regulations more specifically to vegetables could stimulate local variety development and seed production and benefit smallholder farmers and consumers at large.

KEYWORDS:

• Seed system
• seed policy
• seed regulation
• seed certification
• regional harmonization
• plant variety
• private sector
• plant variety protection
• plant breeding

Acknowledgements

The opinions expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of FCDO or USAID. We thank two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Interviews were conducted over a period of three months in 2020.

2 A sui generis framework is a unique legal framework tailored to a particular legal classification, in this case a unique IPR framework for plant variety protection. Many countries have based PVP legislation on UPOV.

3 UPOV rules allow countries to permit farmers to use protected varieties for propagation and exchange (also known as ‘farmer’s privilege’). Under UPOV, farmer’s privilege is subject to countries national laws and regulations, and domestic approaches vary but must follow international obligations such as UPOV and the Arusha Protocol. UPOV 1978 and UPOV 1991 do differ in their coverage of farmers’ rights.

4 The Seed (Amendment) Regulations, 2017, Amendment of Regulation 4 (Tanzania).

5 The term ‘basic seed’ is used in the OECD system while US system uses ‘foundation seed’ for the same generation.

6 The OIC is issued when the seed sample or consignment has officially been drawn from a seed lot that has been tested by an ISTA accredited laboratory. The BIC is issued when the sample is drawn from a lot that has been tested by an ISTA accredited laboratory, where the laboratory accredits only the sample and not the full seed lot (Keyser, 2013).

Additional information

Funding

This study was partly made possible through support provided by the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) of the UK government to World Vegetable Center and the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Small Scale Irrigation through the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), under the terms of Contract No. AID-OAA-A-13-00055. Funding was also provided by other long-term strategic donors to the World Vegetable Center: Taiwan, Australian Centre for International Agricultural Research (ACIAR), Germany, Thailand, Philippines, Korea, and Japan.