Participatory seed production and distribution system for self-sufficiency in seed supply

Abstract:

Imagine a cluster of ten villages in the Chitwan-Gorkha belt where, at the start of every kharif season, farmers must travel 35 to 60 kilometres to the nearest municipality town just to buy sealed bags of the same rice and finger millet seed they could grow themselves. The seed bill eats into thin margins, and varietal choice is narrow. This research evaluated a community-based participatory seed production and distribution system set up in ten villages of Gorkha district between 2019 and 2023. A village-level seed committee was formed in each village, six producer farmers per village were selected and trained, and a hub-and-spoke distribution architecture was established to supply 12 to 16 recipient households per village. Rice (Sabitri), finger millet (finger millet, Dalle-1) and pulses (lentil and black gram) were the focal crops. Seed self-sufficiency rose from a baseline of 24.6 percent for rice, 18.3 percent for finger millet and 31.2 percent for pulses in 2019 to 83.6, 76.8 and 82.9 percent respectively by 2023. Seed cost to the participating households fell by 58 percent across the four-year period, germination rates of community-produced seed stayed between 86 and 93 percent, and genetic purity assessed at 96.4 percent on grow-out trials. Household adoption of participatory seed rose from 14 to 87 percent. The findings argue that village-level seed committees working within a hub-and-spoke architecture offer a practical route to seed self-sufficiency without displacing public-sector seed systems.