The most interesting\nthing about my week in Togo was that about an hour after landing in Lome, I was\naddressing the Minister of Agriculture and his full cabinet regarding the\nimportance of improved seed for Togo\u2019s farmers, and the mission of SSG. And I\u2019d never been to Togo. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The high-energy\nAgriculture Minister, Mr. Noel Koutera Bataka, told me after the meeting that\nour proposal was exactly what the country needed, and that I would not be\nallowed to leave Togo without agreeing on a plan d\u2019action for developing its\nseed sector. Later I would learn that he\neven wants to make Togo a regional seed powerhouse. Great vision!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The rest of the week,\nwhich was spent up-country, touring production zones with WACCI-trained maize\nbreeder, Dr. Tchala Noudifule, was inevitably a bit less dramatic, but not by\nmuch. Togo is maize country, and I\ntrained and worked as a maize breeder, so I found it amazing that the country\nliterally depends on seed of a 40-year old open-pollinated variety for its food\nsupply. Not a single grain of hybrid\nmaize seed available, in a country that grows maize from north to south, east\nto west. My honest reaction: How can this be?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ghana, right next\ndoor, is producing thousands of tons of hybrid maize seed every year, as is\nNigeria, just two countries to the east. \nYet for lack of access to varieties, and lack of knowledge of how to\nproduce hybrid seed, which really isn\u2019t very complicated, Togo has never moved\nbeyond cultivation of non-hybrid maize varieties developed decades ago. It even has a network of agro-dealers. But none of them appeared to be selling\ncertified seed of maize, soybean, rice or cowpea, which are the country\u2019s main\nfood crops. The problem is Togo\u2019s\nvarieties are old and low-yielding compared to new varieties, and most farmers\nalready have seed of the standard varieties, and are not motivated to go out\nand buy more of the same.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In Togo I met two\nremarkable seed business people \u2013 Julien Amouzou, founder and CEO of Le Paysan\nSeed Company, and Mentieme Kombate, founder and CEO of a second seed company in\nthe south of Togo. These two seed\nentrepreneurs, without any prior experience or knowledge of how seed companies\nare structured or operate, have formed exactly that \u2013 vertically integrated,\nprivate, seed production and distribution companies. The only problem is that their seed, in the\nwords of Monsieur Kombate, \u201cNe sont pas competitives (are not\ncompetitive)\u201d. So selling the seed is a\nstruggle. My response: Let\u2019s add hybrids to the mix, and watch the\nfarmers react.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The most interesting thing about my week in Togo was that about an hour after landing in Lome, I was addressing the Minister of Agriculture and his full cabinet regarding the importance of improved seed for Togo\u2019s farmers, and the mission of SSG. And I\u2019d never been to Togo. The high-energy Agriculture Minister, Mr. Noel […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.seedsystemsgroup.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.seedsystemsgroup.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.seedsystemsgroup.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.seedsystemsgroup.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.seedsystemsgroup.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1720"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/new.seedsystemsgroup.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1720\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.seedsystemsgroup.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/new.seedsystemsgroup.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1720"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.seedsystemsgroup.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1720"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/new.seedsystemsgroup.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1720"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}