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.
