Year-end Sale % OFF 
Abstract
This article explores the informal seed business, focusing on the yellow bean in Tanzania. The yellow bean is a major bean type traded, yet little is known about the seed supply that fuels it. The survey research in 2019 encompassed larger grain traders, informal seed traders, and retailers, covered major production, distribution and sale hubs, and was complemented by GIS mapping of seed and grain flows and DNA fingerprinting of yellow bean samples. Results showed that traders buy and sell grain and informal seed: it is not one business or the other, but both. Informal seed is an important moneymaker, representing between 15 and 40% of trader business in non-sowing and sowing periods, respectively. In the year monitored, 100% of the yellow bean seed was drawn from the informal sector, amounting to $US 4.35 million just among those sampled. Nevertheless, the informal and formal sectors are clearly linked, as over 60% of the beans sampled derived from modern varieties. Informal traders prove key for: sustaining the grain business, serving the core of the seed business, and moving varieties at scale. More explicit efforts are needed to link the informal sector to formal research and development partners in order to achieve even broader impacts.
Highlights
Accepted: 3 August 2021The informal seed sector is widely recognized as the one smallholder farmers in Africa mainly use to access seed for their range of crops
While this article focuses on Tanzania, as the local seed trade tends to be within country, mapping of the full flows shows that the yellow bean grain corridor extends beyond Tanzania to the region at large: Burundi, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zambia
For the yellow bean trader survey work, data were collected via android devices using structured questionnaires that were subsequently coded in Open Data Kit (ODK)
Summary
The informal seed sector is widely recognized as the one smallholder farmers in Africa mainly use to access seed for their range of crops. While not all the supplies offered at markets are suitable for planting, farmers who aim to sow actively scout out materials that are adapted, visibly clean, often of a known variety, and from a seller they trust. This subset of grain, purposely selected for planting, has been variously termed ‘potential seed’, ‘implicit seed’, ‘local seed’, or ‘informal seed’, but for ease of reference, we use the single term informal seed. Note that farmers may expressly produce and select informal seed, starting from the first steps of sowing and management in their fields
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