by Mike Listman

CGIAR December 7, 2017

A sunny November day brings hundreds of farmer seed producers to Doyogena, a scenic highland village in Ethiopia’s Southern Nations, Nationalities, and Peoples’ Region (SNNP). The visitors form a bustling line to collect more than $90 each – on average – in profits from representatives of the Zereta Kembata Seed Multiplication and Marketing Union.

Figure: Ethiopian farmer seed producers collect payment at the Zereta Kembata Seed Multiplication and Marketing Union facility, in  Doyogena. Photo: CIMMYT/A. Habtamu

“The union receives seed grown by more than 1,100 farmers, several hundred of whom are women, belonging to 8 farmer cooperatives,” said Yosief Balewold, general manager of the union.

With help from Ethiopia’s Agricultural Transformation Agency, Zereta Kembata began in 2016 to collect, clean, pack, and sell seed of wheat, potato, sorghum, and faba bean. “This year we marketed nearly 27 tons of the new, disease resistant wheat seed; that’s enough to sow around 270 hectares of the crop.”

Pitted against a yearly onslaught of fast-evolving fungal diseases that can infect as much as $200 million worth of the crops they are growing, more than 75,000 small-scale wheat farmers in Ethiopia’s 4 major wheat-growing regions will have gained access by late 2017 to a vital asset—over 400 tons of new, disease resistant wheat varieties of wheat seed, much of it produced by other farmers.

Marketed in tandem with science-based recommendations for growing wheat, the annual seed supply has steadily increased since 2014 through the Wheat Seed Scaling Initiative, led by the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT) and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

“We’re energizing and diversifying Ethiopia’s wheat seed sector, partly by involving and benefitting both formal and farmer seed producers, including women and men,” said Bekele Abeyo, a CIMMYT scientist who leads the project.

With money from union shares purchased by farmer cooperatives and a regulatory 30 percent reinvestment of earnings, the union is building a large warehouse to store seed. In a smaller shack nearby sits a 0.75 ton steel seed cleaner donated by the Wheat Seed Scaling Initiative, which has been working with Zereta Kembata and other seed producers identified as outstanding by SNNP policymakers.

See more: http://www.cimmyt.org/ethiopian-farmers-profit-from-scaled-up-fast-track-production-of-disease-resistant-wheat-seed/