Farmer Seed Exchange and Crop Diversity in a Changing Agricultural Landscape in the Southern Highlands of Ethiopia

The southern highlands of Ethiopia are home to some of the planet’s oldest agricultural systems, dating back 10,000 years (Brandt et al. 1997), and are considered a global center of crop diversity (Vavilov and Chester 1951). The highland landscape is made up of a patchwork of small, diverse subsistence farms, grasslands, and forests where the lines between ‘human’ and ‘natural’ are indistinct, and the actions of farmers are a driving force in the distribution of biodiversity. Crop diversity serves both to buffer the global food supply against environmental change and pest and disease outbreaks, and to maintain the sustainability of traditional small-scale agricultural systems (Gepts 2006). These diverse crops and varieties are created and maintained through seed exchange among farmers, and the scales and strengths of these pathways have enormous influence on agricultural biodiversity. In order to understand patterns of diversity, it is therefore useful to explore the patterns of farmer seed exchange that influence farmers’ use of and access to agricultural biodiversity, and the ways in which cultural, demographic, and agricultural changes have the potential to enhance or erode that diversity. Our research focuses on four related questions: 1) How the scales and mechanisms of seed exchange affect diversity; 2) How those practices differ among locations, agroecological zones, and individual farms; 3) How and why those practices are changing; and 4) What the effects of those changes on diversity in this agroecosystem may be.