ABSTRACT
In the early 1990s, many development organizations began to support the establishment of community seed banks (CSBs) with the primary goal of enhancing food and seed security. The normal agricultural development paradigm assumed that all farmers, from subsistence to commercial, would eventually become clients of public and private seed systems, and the formal sectors would ensure their access to quality seed of improved varieties (Douglas, 1980; Frankel and Soulé, 1981). We now realize that this never actually happened. Small-scale farmers in Africa, Asia and Latin America, but also in Europe and North America, use farm-saved seed and rely to a large degree on the informal system for accessing new materials (Byerlee et al., 2007; Louwaars and De Boef, 2012).
