Access to crop diversity and small farms’ resilience to climate variability in African drylands: The role of seed and information networks

Project Information

ARISER

Grant agreement ID: 101041069

DOI

10.3030/101041069

EC signature date 8 April 2022

Start date 1 June 2022

End date 31 May 2027

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 500 000,00

EU contribution

€ 1 500 000,00

Coordinated by

CENTRE DE COOPERATION INTERNATIONALE EN RECHERCHE AGRONOMIQUE POUR LEDEVELOPPEMENT - C.I.R.A.D. EPIC
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ARISER (Access to crop diversity and small farms’ resilience to climate variability in African drylands: The role of seed and information networks)

Reporting period: 2022-06-01 to 2024-11-30

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

Crop diversity is a key resource for smallholder farmers in drylands, as it plays a major role in their resilience by
stabilizing crop production in the face of climate variability. Although access to crop diversity is pivotal for these farmers,
the processes driving access are not fully understood. Previous research indicates that access to crop diversity may
rely on the social networks through which crop seeds and information are diffused. These networks display a wide
diversity of patterns, including differences in the composition of the actors involved and in the structure of the pathways
through which seeds and information diffuse. Understanding the consequences of these different network patterns for
crop diversity and their implication for farm resilience is a crucial and timely challenge. In this project, I will address this
challenge by combining theory and methods from agroecology and social network research to tackle three objectives:
(1) identify the most critical network patterns to maintain high crop diversity on farms over time or to change crops, (2)
assess the relation between network patterns and temporal stability of crop production at the farm level, and (3) assess
how farmers socioeconomic characteristics affect their access to seed and information. To reach these objectives, I will
(i) design a standardized protocol to collect longitudinal and panel data across three dryland areas in Africa, which could
serve as a reference for future studies, (ii) build an innovative simulation model combining agent-based and network
approaches, and (iii) develop new statistical methods for network analysis. This project will enable a major advance
in our understanding of the processes driving farmers access to crop diversity and their resilience. By doing so, it will
contribute to improve decision-making for smallholder farmers adaptation to increased climate variability in drylands.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The first nine months of the project ARISER was a preparation stage. It was first devoted to organizational and administrative activities, mainly the team recruitment (3 PhD students and 1 post-doctoral student), the establishment of agreements with research collaborators in Senegal, Madagascar and Morocco, and the implementation of ethics procedure that encompass fulfilling procedures related to the GDPR, Nagoya protocol and research permits.
During this preparation stage, we also advanced the scientific activities with the design and test of a common research protocol for the core farm surveys (submitted to Plos One in July 2024). A preliminary field survey was conducted to finalize the study site selection, collect data on the general context of these sites, and request the consent of local authorities. PhD students also advanced their research proposal during this preparation stage, bringing complementary perspectives on facets of the project through different disciplinary perspectives.
We then entered into the implementation of the project, with the implementation of the core farm surveys in each field site. These surveys have been conducted for two consecutive years so far, with 2240 households surveyed in 2023 and 1317 in 2024. Market survey were also conducted once in each field site. PhD students conducted their fieldwork and started the analysis of part of their data, with one paper submitted to Agriculture and Human Values and three oral presentations to the congress of the International Society of Ethnobiology (Marrakech, May 2024). In addition to that, we welcomed two PhD from Larache University( Morocco) and Antananarivo University (Madagascar) in our team for a scientific stay of 3 months.
We develepped a prototype of serious game called "Graine de réseau" which aims to better understand seed access and how farmers take decision concerning cultivated diversity. Prototype was then tested in 6 villages in Senegal.
Preliminary results highlight the diversity of stakeholders involved in seed circulation in the three study sites, with seed sellers on local markets being the main seed source cited by farmers in the three sites. The share of peer-to-peer relationship involved in seed circulation differed between countries, being the highest in Madagascar and the lowest in Morocco. Stakeholders from the state and private seed sectors were overall rarely mentioned as seed sources, except for wheat in Morocco. Seeds of different kind were frequently found to coexist in field sites and farms: farmers seeds from landraces, “recycled” seeds from varieties disseminated by development actors, or certified seeds of registered varieties. We now get into the analysis of these data, with the recruitment of two postdoctoral fellows in 2026.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The design of a protocol for comparable data collection represents a significant advance in our research field, as research on seed circulation was dominated by case studies that applied different methods, which limits the comparison of the results. Applying this protocol in three different although comparable study sites and over four years is the first attempt to identify if some particular seed and information circulation modalities are related to an enhanced access of farmers to crop diversity, and confer more resilience in the face of perturbations. This represent a real breakthrough in research on smallholder farmers seed systems, and it open the way for future comparable research to be conducted in a variety of contexts.
At this stage of the project, we already acknowledge the major contribution of comparing different field sites with comparable agricultural and seed systems characteristics to the general understanding of the processes that drive smallholder access to crop diversity.