Market-driven transitions in the vegetable seed sector in sub-Saharan Africa

Emily ter Steeg, PhD candidate Development Economics at Wageningen University, recently wrote a paper called ‘Market-driven transitions in the vegetable seed sector in sub-Saharan Africa’ together with Niels Louwaars. In the research article, they explore the role vegetable seed companies play in transforming seed systems across sub-Saharan Africa. In this interview, we discuss the research project with Emily, results she found most interesting and what she considers to be the main take-aways for the SeedNL community.

Can you explain what your idea behind writing this article was?

The initial reason for writing this article was the fact that we wanted to study the vegetable seed sector. Most academic literature is focused on maize while vegetable seed companies are frontrunners in their interaction with farmers and building their own market. So, my goal was to research how vegetable seed companies create their markets and also explain how these companies impact seed sector development. I find it very interesting how they approach this and how they can act as example for other seed companies, even though these might not have the same resources.  The Access to Seeds Index offers one perspective on how seed companies work with smallholders farmers, but this perspective does not fully capture existing diversity within the private sector, so we wanted to add some nuance.

How did you approach your research?

The research was a qualitative project, with our first step to get a better understanding of the narrative of these companies. I interviewed 18 vegetables seed companies at the strategic level, so I mostly talked to commercial directors or regional commercial leads. It was already quite unique to be able to openly speak with these representatives and to get insights into their company strategies in sub-Saharan Africa. We wanted to see if there were similarities in how these companies talk about seed sector development and these emerging markets.

We noticed companies talked about working with a wide spectrum of commercial farmers, from very small-scale to larger ones, and we talked about the type of seeds they sell, distinguishing between OPVs, hybrids and advanced hybrids covering the entry-level up to advanced. Most companies are working on the transition to hybrid seeds because this is how they earn a return on investments in breeding and marketing: they can differentiate themselves from others when selling hybrids.

The analysis enabled us to identify four different types of seed companies based on the link of the value chain they focus on, something which we call a seed system function in academia:  variety development, seed production, seed dissemination and seed use. These four types of companies play a different role in the seed sector development process, as they have a different specialization, work with different types of farmers and they also enter the market at different stages.

We do notice that most companies are trying to evolve and expand their activities: distribution companies, for example, want to get more active in breeding because they see the market getting more advanced and want to remain relevant; variety development companies developers want to start investing more in their local presence to build a relationship with the farmers.

What did you find the most interesting or unexpected findings?

 The situation in sub-Saharan Africa is clearly different compared to the Dutch situation. Most of the well-known Dutch vegetable seed companies are renowned for R&D and they have strong relationships with their customers with an integrated value chain. In sub-Saharan Africa, the landscape is diverse: it was nice to investigate where these distribution companies without breeding or production activities source their seed and how these B2B relationships work.

Also, seed types turned out to be important. Vegetable seed companies talk about seed sector development in terms of seed types and ‘hybridization’ is an important positive indicator of development progress. However, a farmer will not transition directly from saved seed to a hybrid, but this transition often goes via an OPV. Still companies prefer not to invest in OPVs because you cannot protect this investment and will also be helping other companies. Some companies do find solutions for this like seed treatments, which gives them an advantage.

What did you find interesting findings for the SeedNL community?

Firstly, I think it will be interesting for non-private sector actors to learn about the business models of vegetable seed companies. For seed companies, it can offer a new perspective on their own activities, which might encourage reflection. Of course, I do understand that an academic article might be ‘heavy’ reading.

We often talk about collaboration between different types of actors and SeedNL itself is a public-private partnership. However, do we spend sufficient time trying to understand the other type of actor? We need to acknowledge that often there are frictions and figure out how to deal with those.

How do the companies you interviewed look at the role of the public sector in their activities?

Whereas public breeding is major for staple crops, the private sector takes the lead for veggies. For quality assurance, vegetable seed companies sometimes set more ambitious quality standards than legally required. Also, they are doing extension work and might prefer to do this technical work themselves because they know their varieties best.

Still, companies recognize the important role of public sector in (co-)financing R&D and capacity building activities. Public financing instruments incentivise companies to enter a market earlier on, enable them to do more capacity building, and facilitate collaboration with development actors. Also, public actors play an important role in navigating and developing enabling environments. SeedNL is an example in both regards.

What do you hope the SeedNL community takes away when reading this article?

We need to appreciate complementarity in the seed sector. Some NGOs might not fully recognize the amount of research and capacity building done by seed companies. Some seed companies might not recognize how others are reaching farmers they do not reach or working on crops they cannot cover.

Tomatoes and onions, the key crops for most vegetable seed companies, will not solve the challenge of nutrition security so we need to see how to step up our game together. We need a diversity of seed sector actors to serve diverse farm systems to grow diverse crops.

The full article can be accessed here: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X24002634