| Abstract | 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 todate of Farmers’ Seed Systems (FSS); (2) design and evaluate a novel social- and politicalecological 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. |
