Smallholders have limited access to quality seeds of improved varieties. Seed is the cornerstone of any productivity gains at the farm gate. Despite all the effort and investment made in breeding by the public sector, many smallholder farmers in Africa and Asia still plant low-quality seeds of the same varieties used by previous generations.

The White Paper commissioned by Crops to End Hunger, a One CGIAR initiative, identified several bottlenecks to commercial seed delivery. These can be broadly classified into policy and regulatory barriers hindering variety release, insufficient understanding of target markets, lack of technical and business capacity of small and medium seed enterprises (SMEs), and the need to better define roles and responsibilities between One CGIAR, National Breeding Programs (NBP) and commercial seed companies in a changing landscape.

This limited access to quality seeds of improved varieties represents a significant barrier to farmers in achieving higher yields and improved livelihoods and represents a major risk to the ability to adapt to a rapidly changing climate.

As quoted by the SFSA management, “While there have been critical improvements in breeding crops for resource-poor smallholder farmers, adoption of recent varieties at scale, especially by resource-poor farmers, has not been achieved in sub-Saharan Africa and many parts of Asia. It requires a well thought-out and articulated launch process to ensure that the public sector varieties considered will successfully be taken up by commercial channels and reach smallholder farming communities.” SFSA has designed a toolkit that contains the know-how, some best practices, and a set of tools to secure the positioning of any new varieties at the farm gate. It contributes to narrowing the knowledge gap between quality breeding and achieving successful commercialization of improved varieties. This commercialization toolkit is essential to ensuring that all the necessary steps and activities that lead to a successful launch of a new variety are properly covered. It provides a greater understanding of the steps involved, for breeding practitioners as well as potential investors and donors