Crop adaptation to climate change in SSA: The role of genetic resources and seed systems

Abstract

Crop adaptation plays a key role in enabling farmers to adapt to the impacts of climate change. According to the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), cultivar adjustment is the single most effective on-farm adaptation strategy, but the report is largely silent on the modalities of cultivar adjustment; what are the assumptions with regard to the cultivar types used and the institutional context in which the adjustments will take place? The objective of the current paper is to explore these modalities and enhance our understanding of the potential for crop adaptation in Sub Saharan Africas’s agriculture. We identify the key environmental impacts and the adaptation options vis-à-vis these impacts. Drawing on insights and perspectives from the international scholarly literature on genetic resources and seed systems, we report on a local case study from the semi-arid zone in Tanzania. Farmers use a range of varieties and seed systems to cope with current climatic stress and our findings from Tanzania illustrates that crop adaptation is not only a question of switching from one modern variety to another as commonly assumed in the Climate Change impact and adaptation literature. In our case study, only 24 % of the maize seeds and 8 % of the sorghum seeds were sourced through seed supply channels classified as formal. However, in the case of maize, we found that at least 11 % of the seeds sourced from informal seed supply channels were farm-saved modern varieties. Open Pollinated Varieties of maize developed in public breeding programs in collaboration with international programs in the 1980s are still an important part of farmers’ adaptive capacity. Our results further indicate that crop adaption can happen through creolization between modern and local varieties in the local seed system. We argue that seed security in the face of climatic change depends on adaptive seed systems, which integrate formal and informal seed system approaches to the development, release and distribution of varieties.