Promoting seed systems for stress-tolerant varieties at scale: Potential for bundling with insurance-advisory services

Francesco Cecchi, Samson Dejene Aredo, Benjamin Kivuva, Simon Omondi, Joseph Chegeh, Amos Tabalia and Berber Kramer

Project notes from International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Abstract: Smallholder farmers may suffer losses from ex-treme weather events, pests and disease. This is expected to worsen in the face of climate change. Natural disasters are a threat to food security not only ex post, by inducing farmers to sell their as-sets, keep children out of school or borrow at high rates; they also threaten livelihoods ex ante, by discouraging farmers from investing in high-return practices and technologies (Elbers et al., 2007). Fortunately, significant progress has been made in the past two decades in developing and releasing seeds with genetic traits that are more tolerant to weather shocks, pests and disease. These im-provements in seed technology are offering prom-ising pathways to improve farmers’ adaptive ca-pacity, increasing investments and thereby agri-cultural productivity (Emerick et al., 2016).

Keywords: insurance; advisory services; seeds; technology; smallholders; information and communication technologies; smart materials; Kenya; Eastern Africa; Africa; Sub-Saharan Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-agr, nep-ias and nep-ict
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:fpr:prnote:pndecember_133755

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