10 Guiding Principles for Good Seed Aid Practice: Short Video
Written by Abby Love, Agriculture Advisor, Mercy Corps, and Louise Sperling, SeedSystem
Emergencies often disrupt the lives of farming families and their agricultural production. Smallholder farmers are particularly vulnerable and deal with a range of shocks and stresses, including climate variability and conflict. During emergencies, humanitarian practitioners need to intervene quickly to help restore the local farming system to its pre-disaster state or better, ensuring farmers under stress can resume producing food and become more resilient — even in the short term.
Seed security interventions are a particular focus of humanitarian aid as seed is relatively easy for farmers to use and can provide quick returns. While good seed aid can bolster farming systems, poor seed aid can increase farmers’ vulnerability. For instance, seed that arrives too late or poorly adapted seed wastes farmers’ land and labor resources. Also, aid repeated over multiple seasons breeds farmer dependency and stifles the development of commercial seed enterprises.
How can the humanitarian community avoid bad seed aid?
The Seed Emergency Response Tool (SERT), developed by Mercy Corps and SeedSystem through ISSD Africa, is one tool to help policy makers, program managers, and field staff engaged in emergency and early recovery agricultural responses do seed aid better. It helps those new to this area of work, as well as those with experience, to make informed, quality decisions about the choice of a seed security intervention and how best to implement it.
“[The SERT] is excellent work and really a huge contribution in terms of providing a great review of key documents/tools, a really well done background which sets the stage for the ten principles, and the decision trees.” — USAID Technical Advisor
The SERT introduces a set of 10 Guiding Principles for Good Seed Aid Practice developed based on decades of experience in seed aid from varied multi-platform groups. This NEW video presents the 10 principles, which are clear, actionable and reliable guidelines for good seed aid practice and should be used to shape all emergency seed security interventions.
10 Guiding Principles for Good Seed Aid Practice
1. Do an assessment
2. Match the type of response to the seed security problem(s)
3. Be clear about the intervention’s goal
4. Confirm that the response type can actually be implemented in the given context
5. Ensure the intervention gets seed to farmers on time
6. Give priority to market-based assistance
7. Ensure crop and variety suitability
8. Verify seed quality to meet minimum standards of farmers, practitioners and donors
9. Offer farmers choice
10. Arrange for multiple types of feedback
For more information and technical guidance on the principles, see the SERT, pages 30–37.
The SERT also contains multiple examples of market-based seed security interventions. Market-based approaches to seed security have grown in recent years among humanitarian practitioners because of their potential to inject significant funds into local economies in times of stress. If applied correctly, market-based strategies can improve the capacity of markets to provide farmers and households with critical benefits, such as seed, basic services, and credit, with greater reach and adaptability than humanitarian agencies can achieve directly.
We welcome feedback! Should you have comments or questions on the SERT, please contact:
- Mercy Corps: Abby Love, alove@mercycorps.org and Andrea Mottram, amottram@mercycorps.org
- SeedSystem: Louise Sperling, sperling@seedsystem.org
A vendor measures sorghum for a customer at the seeds and tools fair organized by Mercy Corps.
For more information about Agriculture Systems at Mercy Corps, contact us at agriculturesystems@mercycorps.org.
