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COVID-19: Rapid assessments highlight immediate impacts on seed sector
Stakeholders in seed and other agricultural sectors are facing critical challenges to their normal activities. Without fast and informed action, the COVID-19 crisis risks becoming a global food crisis. Wageningen University & Research (WUR) and partners are collaborating to identify priority steps for enhancing food systems’ resilience in low and middle income countries.
By framing clear and actionable alerts, we’re enabling decision-makers across government and industry to focus on measures that get quality seed where it needs to be.
Dr. Walter de Boef, senior advisor seed systems at Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation (WCDI), part of WUR: “Measures to combat the spread of COVID-19 are hampering the access and use of quality seed at a crucial time of the year for many countries. By framing clear and actionable alerts, we’re enabling decision-makers across government and industry to focus on measures that get quality seed where it needs to be. The Rapid Assessments and stakeholder discussions are of crucial importance to ensure food security in low and middle income countries, where loss of access to food is at stake now that COVID-19 measures are in place”.
Targeted alerts to guide decisions
De Boef is part of the team on Integrated Seed Sector Development (ISSD) at WCDI. The multidisciplinary team are working with strategic partners in Nigeria, Ethiopia, Myanmar and Uganda to generate a first set of targeted alerts, starting last week in Nigeria.
De Boef: “Through the survey and focus group discussions, we generated four direct alerts. These show that the measures the government have implemented to combat the spread of the virus are reducing market access for seed producers, agro-dealers and farmers, that prices are increasing and becoming unaffordable for farmers, that quality assurance process are hampered and that early generation seed production is hindered. Planting in Nigeria happens in May and June, so it is critical that urgent actions ensure farmers can get seed”.
Through the survey and focus group discussions, we generated four direct alerts.
Each alert is accompanied with priority actions that in-country partners say are critical to keep the sector moving as well as recommendations for who should be involved in action and which sector stakeholder needs to take what steps. The assessment process takes place over the course of a week and is planned to be repeated on a monthly basis, meaning that seed sector partners share in the development of suitable responses in an ongoing and collaborative process.
Dashboard for policy makers
Wageningen Centre for Development Innovation implements sector transformation programmes in low and middle income countriese, turning ‘knowledge into action’. Collaborating with strong networks of local and international partners, WCDI has been able to act quickly and facilitate local assessment teams to generate data.
De Boef: “We base the assessment on a model of sector transformation that we use in our programmes. The assessment starts with seed sector stakeholders completing a mobile phone based survey that we developed. The survey probes changes in every function of the sector. Our country partners establish a panel of diverse stakeholders from across the sector. Focus group discussions explore and agree on urgent actions to priority points as discovered in the survey. We complete the assessment by publishing a seed alert with a dashboard, which we also send directly to policy-makers, key industry bodies and others across the national seed sector”.
Model for other sectors
Combining speed and reliability, the process is proving valuable for sector stakeholders. Now, similar alerts are being developed to cover the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on the functioning of the horticultural and sesame sectors in multiple countries in Africa. Alerts for potato and dairy sectors are being considered as well. These are sectors in developing countries and emerging economies in which WCDI, other WUR institutes and principal partner SNV Netherlands Development Organization are active.
Working with a similar model in various sectors and countries over time gives important insights in the impact of the crisis on food systems at national, regional and global levels
Our focus is of course on helping sectors to deal with the current crisis. But in the longer term, we hope that the process will inform our collective work on developing resilient food systems, so that future pandemics won’t carry the same risks of hunger and malnutrition.