Several years ago a group of agriculture experts at the Rockefeller Foundation, frustrated by the state of agriculture development in sub-Saharan Africa, started a program with a simple mission. They wanted farmers in Africa to have something farmers elsewhere in the world take for granted: a steady supply of seed for more productive or “improved” crop varieties. This seed could help the farmers generate higher crop yields and overcome the constant barrage of plant pests, drought, and disease that are the enemies of agriculture everywhere.
For centuries, farmers in Africa have skillfully operated their own informal seed systems. They save seeds from one year’s crop for planting in the next and share seeds through community networks. Many have worked like plant breeders in research laboratories, combining different varieties to obtain desirable traits and collaborating with other farmers to expand their knowledge.
Despite this impressive ingenuity, the performance of local varieties of maize, cassava, millet, and other African food staples now lags far behind the rest of the world. Harvests per hectare for major crops like maize can be as much as 80 percent below their potential. More importantly, this yield gap is a key reason farmers in Africa are not producing enough food to sustain the continent’s rapidly growing population.
The desire to give African farmers a wider range of seed choices—including access to seed of highly productive crop varieties known as hybrids, which have revolutionized food production elsewhere in the world—eventually led to the creation of the Program for Africa’s Seed Systems, or PASS.
Today, PASS is an integral part of the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA).
AGRA was launched by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation in 2006. Its goal is to develop practical ways to improve production and income for the millions of smallholder farmers, who form the core of Africa’s dynamic but neglected agricultural sector. And a key priority for AGRA is to upgrade Africa’s seed systems.
In many ways, the work of PASS is just beginning to bear fruit in fields across the continent. Many obstacles remain to providing Africa’s smallholder farmers with the seed they need and deserve. But the program is making substantial progress.
If the production from all 80 PASS-supported seed companies is added up, it constitutes the biggest seed producer working in sub-Saharan Africa today. From a mere 2,346 metric tons in 2007, annual production from PASS producers had risen, by 2014, to 80,606 metric tons of professionally certified seeds. Moreover, the companies are focusing on crop varieties endowed with traits carefully selected by local crop breeders for their compatibility with specific African agricultural environments— of which there are many.
The companies also are working with a wide range of crop types. They include improved, locally adapted varieties of maize, cassava, millet, rice, sorghum, beans, sweet potato, cowpea, groundnut, soybean, pigeon pea, sweet potato, banana, durum wheat, and bread wheat.