Access to healthy viable seed for all farmers. Seed is critical for food security, yet a major bottleneck to a vibrant seed industry lies within the certification process and the natural ageing process of certified seed moving along the supply chain. What was certified as high quality seed, can become low or poor quality seed if conditions are not to agreed standards throughout the entire supply chain. In the early 1990s, ‘Structural Adjustment Programs’ (SAPs) privatised many parastatal seed companies and opened up the seed sector to private investment in many countries, spurring a proliferation of commercial seed companies and to some extent creating what is now estimated to be a $42 Billion global industry that has increased the choice of crops and varieties available to farmers through the commercial sector.

Before reaching the farmer, new seed varieties go through multiple levels of production and approval, each requiring a quality inspection process to be completed and reported. This comes with risk of failure or rejection at each stage.

Seed quality control and certification has remained largely in the public domain where the capacity of public seed institutions struggle to keep pace with the sector’s expansion. Globally, regulatory agencies are overwhelmed by local seed production and consumption needs and also with imports and exports of seed. With the expanded private sector requests, and limited resources and tools to handle the workload, digitization of the seed value chain offers promise for improved efficiency and productivity in producing and certifying seed.

It is important that a global scheme such as SeedAssure work with the seed industry to overcome production challenges and potential biosecurity threats that accompany the frequent movement of large volumes of seed around the world. Currently, quality assurance systems are still largely paper-based and are not linked or interoperable with digital systems of institutions of countries through which seed must pass. As a result seed inspection work often backlogs, and avoidable misdiagnoses occur, creating significant risk for commercial producers, dis-incentivizing new product adoption, variety turnover, and regional trade.

Whilst the setting of seed standards and certification is primarily in the public domain, several countries have supported the privatization of inspection services to delegate the high workload. Maintaining a single, professional ‘tried and tested’ standard and a single unifying platform, to manage all the data generated by these new corps of Inspectors would be ideal for the public and private sectors.

It is recognised that a wider and more cohesive effort is needed across the Common Markets and their seed systems like COMESA, European Union, USA because seed productions are international and interlinked with regular movements across borders and between countries as companies seek the most productive agroecological zones for all their varieties.  This brings with it the objective of putting in place a fully functional Seed Assurance System that will allow seed to be produced to standard where ever in the world that seed is being bred, maintained, bulked, processed or consumed.   Have access to the SeedAssure technology thereby enhances the capacity of the private sector to produce quality seed and in turn the public sector to support quality seed inspection and certification at a pace and scale that matches the demands of the ever more international seed market.