Seed Systems in Mountainous Regions of 11 Tropical and Sub-Tropical Countries

Accessible, high-quality seed is vital to sustainable development of food systems, land use, and agriculture. This study's purpose and methods are: (1) provide a synthetic overview of major understanding, information, and concepts to date of Farmers' Seed Systems (FSS); (2) design and evaluate a novel social- and political ecological model of FSS using globally representative data from tropical and subtropical mountain areas of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; (3) model and test FSS relations to socio-political and environmental factors including major food-crop types (rice, wheat, maize, potato, common bean); (4) generate new geographic and demographic estimates; and (5) develop policy-relevant insights to strengthen FSS for justice-based sustainable development of agriculture, land use, and food systems. The conceptual framework of socioeconomic-political and environmental factors guided the global modeling of data from eleven countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. A multiple regression model explained FSS utilization (R2= 0.53, p <0.0001), specifying the significant inverse relations of FSS to farm area (strong), GDP (strong), and distance to major city (moderate). FSS showed strong positive relations to aridity and topographic ruggedness. FSS were positively related to elevation in a five-country Andean sub-sample. Results estimated FSS utilization by 136 million farmers in the 11-country sample. Novel insights to strengthen FSS policies and programs are the importance of FSS to extremely small farm-area sub-groups and other FSS stakeholder sub-groups, global-region geopolitical distinctness of FSS-farm area relations, multi-district FSS concentrations that enable extra-local FSS connectivity, FSS relation to aridity and climate-change response capacities, and urbanization-associated, high FSS encompassing periurban areas. Policy-relevant results on global geographic and demographic extensiveness of FSS, key socio-political and environment relations, and FSS linkages to agrobiodiversity, agroecology, nutrition, and urbanization recommend innovative knowledge-based approaches that integrate large-scale research to strengthen Farmers' Seed Systems.