Post-disaster rehabilitation and seed restoration in flood affected areas of Xai-Xai District, Mozambique

Gender, Biodiversity and Local Knowledge Systems (LinKS) to strengthen agricultural and rural development
(GCP/RAF/338/NOR)
Prepared by
Trygve Berg, Noragric
Fernando Dava, ARPAC
Judite Muchanga, DNDR

The LinKS Project

This research was sponsored by an FAO regional project called "Gender, Biodiversity and Local Knowledge Systems to Strengthen Agriculture and Rural Development in Southern Africa". The project is assisting many organisations to better understand how the local knowledge of men and women can promote the conservation of biodiversity and enhance food security. The project works with a diverse group of partners in each country including NGOs, government institutions, universities and training centres. The project supports activities in three areas: training, action research and communication. The training is designed to enhance partner organisations' capacity to understand how gender and local knowledge relate to biodiversity and food security and apply gender analysis and participatory approaches in their work. The project also assists partners to carry out action research to explore the question of who has knowledge related to the conservation of biodiversity and how that knowledge can help promote food security. The action research provides a means to adapt, develop and field test methods for community-based, gender-responsive approaches to genetic resource management. The project also plays a key role in facilitating an exchange of information and dialogue on issues among partner organisations through public debates, workshops, communication and networking activities and exchange visits. These activities all contribute to a broader level of sharing, learning and exchange of information about these issues with rural communities, with institutions that interact with farmers and with policy makers.

Purpose of the research

The purpose of the research was to contribute to a better understanding of the role of traditional seed systems in the food security of rural people in Xai-Xai District, Mozambique, especially in light of recent floods.

The research was carried out by a multidisciplinary team from the following institutions:

• National Directorate of Rural Development (DNDR)
• Arquivo do Património Artístico Cultural (ARPAC)
• National Seed Services (SNS) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Lands
• The Mozambiquan Association for Rural Women (AMRU)
• Provincial Services of Rural Extension (SPER)- Xai-Xai

This report presents the immediate impressions of the research team to what they saw and discovered from their talks with many men and women in the two study villages. The LinKS project staff feel that it is important to disseminate this information as soon as possible, since many relief measures and long term plans for assuring greater seed security in Mozambique could benefit from the information. The full report in Portuguese will be prepared by the team in January and disseminated in Mozambique by the LinKS project. For more information, please contact:

Ms. Judite Muxhlanga
Arquivo do Patrimonio Cultural
Rue de Bagamoyo 201, Maputo, MOZAMBIQUE
Tel: +258-1-430165/305559
Fax: +258-1-423935
E-mail: iarpac@zebra.uem.mz

Post-Disaster Rehabilitation and Seed Restoration in Flood Affected Areas of Xai-Xai District, Mozambique: Summary of findings from visits to affected villages and suggestions for action research

The flood in Xai-Xai

The lowlands along the Limpopo River in Mozambique were all inundated during the flood of the rainy season of the year 2000. Three aspects of the flood contributed to the severity of the disaster. Firstly, the water came so fast that people could not rescue seeds or any other property. Secondly, the water level rose to above the roofs of the village houses affecting all property. Food and seeds kept in the houses were destroyed. Thirdly, the flood lasted so long (2 - 3 months) that all crops in the fields died. This included everything except for tree crops. Not even rice, sugar cane or bananas survived such a long period of inundation. Thus this flood led to a complete wipe-out of all plant genetic resources in the lowlands along the Limpopo River.

People of the area also experienced floods in 1955 and 1977. However, neither of these floods resulted in a total loss of seeds or crops. The water receded after only one week. Crops in the field survived, and rice crops benefited from the short flooding and grew better than normal. People had no relevant experiences and were totally unprepared for the kind of disaster that occurred in 2000.

The field work

The National Coordinator of the FAO-LinKS project, Mrs. Judite Muxlanga assisted by the Director of ARPAC, Dr. Fernando Dava, and with technical assistance from Dr. Patrick Matakala, Eduardo Mondlane University, organised visits and field interviews in affected areas in Xai-Xai District from 2-10 December 2000. We visited the village of Feniceleni near the town of Xai-Xai. The village and all its land had been completely under water. We also made interviews in Zongoene, a village that is situated in the uplands, but cultivates both in uplands and lowlands and therefore was only partially affected by the flood. Those two villages were considered representative of the flood-affected communities in Xai-Xai district. We spent several days in each of those villages and visited a number of households, interviewing both men and women.

Post-disaster needs and challenges

The farmers in these villages expressed the following needs:

• Immediately: supply of seeds and planting materials to restart farming.
• On longer term: recuperation of desired seeds that invariably are the traditional varieties that they used to grow before the flood.
• Improved seed security: Household or village seed reserves stored in a safe place (nearby uplands).
• Rehabilitation and further development of drainage canals in the lowlands.
• Ox- or tractor ploughing (currently most cultivation is by hoe).
• Improvement of rural roads.

At national level there is a felt need for national seed reserves, and for building of dams, and regulation of the river in collaboration with the country from where the river comes (in the case of Limpopo that is South Africa).

Personally, we would add that the National Gene Bank should aim at having adequate collections, particularly from vulnerable areas, in order to be in position to contribute to seed restoration when farmers for some reasons lose their seeds.

The pre-flood seed system

As a background for discussion of how to cope with the problems and meet the needs, we interviewed people about the pre-flood seed system. The system is fairly uniform and includes the following key features:

• People are normally self-reliant in seed supply and plant mostly their own saved seeds, or they plant seeds that they receive from other farmers. They sometimes buy in the local market. Commercial seeds rarely enter these areas, and if they do, they are recycled locally and managed like the traditional seeds.
  
  
• It is normal to select seeds and keep grains for seeds and for food separately. Methods of seed selection vary. Most farmers practice post harvest seed selection, but some farmers say they select according to plant vigour in the field. Most of them claimed ability to maintain two maize varieties without loss of varietal integrity through mixing. But we talked with one farmer who said that he was losing his traditional maize variety because it became mixed up.
  
  
• Some families have one variety of each crop and in those cases varieties may not be named. Other farmers could have a number of varieties. We noticed case of two to four varieties of maize and rice, and also several varieties of cowpea and sweet potato. In those cases varieties were named. Rice names were consistent within the village. Maize names, however, were often different from household to household, even among neighbours. It was not clear to us whether there really was a big number of varieties or just different household names for the same general village type of maize (I tend to believe the latter). In some cases variety names are descriptive, but in most cases they had no meaning.
  
  
• Unshelled or un-threshed seeds were stored under the ceiling at cooking places. Threshed seeds were commonly kept in bottles. Some farmers did not add anything to protect the seeds and admitted that they had some problems with pests. We saw samples of weevil-affected seeds of both maize and cowpea. But most farmers mixed seeds with ash before putting them in the bottle. Some also use pesticides. One old man said that he added a little gasoline and shook the bottle with seeds and gasoline. That kept the insects away. One farmer claimed that maize seeds stored with ash in a bottle could be kept for five years. One farmer (in the upland) told about a seed storage method that he called "funge". Seeds on the cob, in the panicle or in the pods were put in a box and stored under protection from rain and sun high up in a tree. He had stopped doing that now because of risk of theft.
  
  
• Some farmers keep a reserve of seeds after planting. Some farmers don't. Most rice farmers do not keep seed reserves. One family living in the uplands had something left of their food rice when they understood that the rice field was going to be destroyed. They then stopped eating rice saving the remaining food rice for seeds. But they were uncertain about germination because they had never stored rice seeds for such a long time before.
  
  
• Activities and knowledge related to seed management are highly gendered, women having the main responsibility.
  
  
• Activities related to seed management are subject to some strict taboos and important events in the cropping calendar are to some extent ritualised.

Coping with the disaster

Many of those who became displaced by the flood still live in camps and depend on food aid. Out of the 800 families who lived in Feniceleni before the flood, 250 have returned. The village has got a new clean water supply system, but otherwise the returnees receive no assistance - neither seeds nor food.

Since the area can be cultivated all the year, the returnees have already some crops growing around their houses. Bananas and sugar cane are replanted. There are stands of maize, a good deal of sweet potato, and mixtures of cowpea, pigeon pea and miscellaneous vegetables. However, what we saw is not enough for their subsistence, and they do not have enough planting materials for their main fields that should be planted in the near future.

What has been planted so far is obtained from relatives and friends in the uplands, mainly as gifts. Those who have money also buy seeds in the local market. We heard stories of how they have walked long distances to find banana suckers.

Some areas have rainfed lowland rice production. Since all rice production was in affected areas, there is nowhere to go for new rice seeds. Also commercial rice seed production schemes were flushed to the see. Therefore there are no rice seeds in the market either. This is a problem the local people see no immediate way out of. Multiplication of the small samples of rice that somehow have been saved may take quite some time.

But other crops exist in the upland villages and in the market. The following can be said about people's ability to access seeds from those sources:

• People are not capable of accessing enough seeds in the short term. Left to fend for themselves, the recovery will be slow and painful.
• Stronger households manage somehow. Vulnerable households are in a precarious situation.

The stronger households are those where the husbands are present and able to make some additional earnings. They are determined and confident. They do not ask for help, only access to good seeds on credit.

The vulnerable households are those where the husband is absent or missing. Many men from the area work in the gold mines in South Africa. They send home money and their families live in houses that are of generally higher standard than what is common in the village. However, the wives are alone with the burdens of restarting cultivation after the disaster. They may not be in position to walk long ways to look for seeds. The most vulnerable households are those headed by widows. These are decidedly the worst off. We met surprisingly many of them. They had got some seeds, but far from enough and are incapable of getting near to what they need.

Seed restoration

The issue of seed restoration appears differently among the lowland dwellers of Feniceleni compared to the mixed upland/lowland farmers of Zongoene. People in Feniceleni complain about the varieties they had got from the uplands. They miss their pre-flood varieties. Regarding maize, several of them said they had observed small stands of their familiar maize type in gardens in Xai-Xai. They therefore believed that those varieties still existed and that they sooner or later would manage to get hold of them. "If we got only a few seeds we would immediately start multiplying them". Some of them complained bitterly about the sweet potatoes they had got hold of. They did not produce tubers in the lowland soils and were only good for leaf production. They talked about the very nice sweet potato varieties they used to have.

Zongoene farmers grow the same crops as those in Feniceleni and in addition groundnuts and cassava, all in their upland fields. In their lowland fields they grow rice, maize, sugar cane and bananas. The problem of rice is already mentioned. On short-term rice production is likely to stop completely. The small samples of saved food rice can, if it germinates, be multiplied and restore the old seeds after a few years of seed increase.

We were told that they use the same maize varieties in both upland and lowland fields. However, interviews on that are very few so we cannot exclude the possibility that some specialised lowland varieties have existed. The farmers who told about this said that they grow two maize crops a year shifting the same variety between the two kinds of soils. When seeds are selected every cropping season, the variety is likely to have become broadly adapted to both upland and lowland soils. Sugar cane is no problem from a genetic restoration point of view. The Zongoene farmers have a lot of bananas in their upland compounds. But they said that they had a special banana variety for the lowland. That variety is completely gone, and they don't know if it can be recovered.

Seed security

Lowland farmers obviously worry about the safety of living and having all property in the riverside village. But traditionally they have preferred to live near the river, and it may not be possible to resettle all of them in the uplands. Many of them mentioned the option of having an upland house for safe storing of seeds. This raises questions of resources, access to upland plots, organisation, and seed storage technology. Maybe this is a case for community action? Various models of community seed banks could be considered.

Conservation of plant genetic resources

Has the wipe out of the plant genetic resources from the flood-affected areas resulted in the loss of unique materials that do not exist anywhere else? A short field visit does not allow us to answer that question definitely, but we are in position to discuss it.

Firstly, the area has long been exposed to modern varieties and what farmers grow may have originated from commercial seeds. However, since they consistently save their own seeds and do some selection, any introduced variety is likely to have been more or less naturalised. Conditions in the lowlands probably do not differ from those in the upland other than for soil characteristics and moisture content. But adaptation to the lowland soils may have given lowland seeds some degree of specific adaptation. The fact that farmers cherish their own seeds in spite of knowledge of modern varieties, indicate that they have materials with some unique characteristics.

We do not know whether the lost varieties have survived somewhere and therefore could be recovered. Farmers, however, thought that was the case and were hopeful and optimistic about the prospect of finding them. This may depend on the degree to which the varieties are specifically tied to lowland conditions. We did not gather much information about seed flow between uplands and lowlands. When a girl is married her mother may stock her with seeds that she takes with her when she moves to her husband's home. Such customs facilitate some movement of seeds between villages. Special investigations are required to find out if the lost varieties can be found in places that escaped the flood.

The local rice varieties most probably do not originate from old landrace materials but rather from introduced commercial seeds. The Gene Bank curator in Maputo, Mr. Paulino Munisse, believed that the locally grown rice varieties could be recovered. For the other crops, this is more uncertain.

The National Gene Bank in Maputo has only recently started collection of the country's national heritage of plant genetic resources. This was not possible for a long period because of the history of the country. When the Gene Bank was established it inherited working collections from research stations, but that was mainly material from international trials. Systematic studies and collection of the traditional seeds in the country has been conducted during the last three years. However, the covering of all of Mozambique is an enormous undertaking and hard priorities are necessary. The northern provinces have been given the first priority. Those areas are less (if at all) exposed to modern seeds and are rich in traditional landrace materials. But this priority means that the Xai-Xai areas and the whole of Gaza province is not yet covered by gene bank collections. There is no hope of finding lost materials from Xai-Xai District in the gene bank.

This priority may have been consciously or unconsciously behind the scanty collections that have been done before. There are some Mozambican materials in international gene banks, particularly those of the CG-centres. A search on the SINGER database for these gene banks reveals that all of the accessions for which coordinates are entered are from the north of the country.

The National Gene Bank in Maputo has (the year before the flood) done a baseline survey of plant genetic resources in various localities, including some communities that were flooded (other places than along Limpopo River). If the survey were repeated now, it would be possible to have fairly accurate information of how such a disaster affects the seed system.

Action and research needs

1. Relief assistance

It should be brought to the attention of relevant authorities that emergency seed deliveries currently do not reach all of the flood victims. The returnees need immediate supplies of seeds and planting materials when they re-establish themselves after the flood. Vulnerable households, particularly those headed by single women, are in a very precarious situation.

2. Seed restoration

a. Search for the lost varieties:

Farmers should be assisted in their search for the lost varieties, and in case of finds, be assisted in multiplication and redistribution.

b. Studies of the uniqueness of the varieties grown in the flood affected areas:

Varieties from lowlands and adjacent uplands should be compared and characterised in order to determine whether lowland materials possess unique characteristics that warrant separate collection and conservation programmes.

c. Seed flows between lowland and adjacent uplands in flood affected areas:

The physical and social closeness of lowlands and adjacent upland areas allows contact and exchange of seeds and planting materials between the two kinds of agro-ecologies. Such seed flow may determine to which degree unique lowland-materials could evolve and be maintained. Such seed exchange, directly through farmer-to-farmer contacts, or indirectly through the market, could be studied both as it is in normal years, and how it is in years when seeds are lost (for instance drought in uplands or flood in lowlands).

3. Seed Security

a. On-farm seed saving and keeping of seed reserves:

Methods and quality of on-farm seed storage could be surveyed and studied with the scope of teaching improved storage methods if needed. The objective should be to enable farmers to keep a surplus of seeds to have reserves for replanting whenever needed.

b. Community seed banks:

A community seed bank located in a nearby upland area could provide safe storage of seed reserves. The LinKS project or other FAO iniatives could provide a survey of relevant models of community seed banks and introduce those models to villages through village meetings. Further follow up depends on how such ideas are received by the village and of village decisions on what approach to take.

Both seed stores and field conservation of clonal materials may be needed. If lowland villages have banana and sweet potato varieties that are not grown in the uplands, specimens of those varieties need to be kept growing, for instance in a garden belonging to the community seed bank store.

4. Gene bank conservation

a. Surveys and actions on gene bank collection and conservation as preparedness for disaster situations:

Mozambique is a member of the SADC Gene Bank in Lusaka. That gene bank is excellent for long term storage of duplicates and may also provide technical backstopping. However, surveys, collection, processing, keeping of active collection, evaluation and characterisation of collected materials, all belong to the duties of the national system. The National Gene Bank in Maputo should be encouraged and supported to reinforce its collection efforts in order to be better prepared to assist farmers in similar disaster situations in the future.

5. Gender and management of plant genetic resources

Hypothesis:

Women's knowledge and skills cannot be fully realised in proper seed management unless they are part of an intact family supported by a husband.

Many farms are managed by single women. They are widows, divorcees, or the husband is absent on labour migration most of the time. A study, where biodiversity indicators are stratified according to women's family situation, may provide insight in how the expression of women's knowledge and skills depend on the family situation. Such a study should collect information from a normal year, and compare this with how women cope and their ability to recovery after disasters.