John Bangirana’s three teenaged children are in secondary school today thanks in large part to seed potatoes.

Two years ago, the development agency AFRICARE gave Bangirana — a farmer in the tiny southwestern Uganda village of Kabira (district of Kabale) — 60 kg of ‘clean’, disease-free tubers from a program organ­ized by Uganda’s National Agri­cultural Research Or­­ga­n­i­­­zation (NARO) in conjunction with CIP.

“From that 60 kg, we got eight bags,” says Ban­­­­gi­rana. “We sold three, planted five and gener­­­ated another 23 bags. Then we sold 18 bags at 20,000 shil­lings (US$12) each.” Without that income, Bangirana wonders how he would have paid the US$200 per term it costs to keep his children in school. “I don’t think I could have made it,” he says. “Now I don’t want to sell ware potatoes anymore, I want to sell seed.”

In Kabale and across Uganda, NARO and CIP are helping farmers like Bangirana get involved in producing seed. The aim is to make up for the generalized shortage of quality seed. This has long been one of the biggest constraints on the country’s potato production.

“Clean seed is  very scarce,” says Berga Lemaga, coordinator of PRAPACE, the Regional Potato and Sweetpotato Improvement Program for East and Central Africa. “The area is infested with bacterial wilt. It’s the number one threat to potato production in Kabale.”

And that’s a major problem. Potato is the primary cash crop in Kabale, 400 km southwest of the capital city Kampala. In fact, the district accounts for about 40 percent of Ugan­da’s po­tato production. Although people depend more on beans, sweetpo­tatoes, sorghum and field peas for food
security, potatoes bring in scarce cash.

The vast majority of Ugandan potato farmers use two methods to obtain seed. Either they set aside some of the smallest potatoes from their harvest for the next season’s seed, or they buy seed potatoes from local markets. Both of these practices promote the spread of bacterial wilt, a devastating plague that lurks in contaminated seed and soil.

Cleaning up

“That’s how the wilt is spread,” explains  Lemaga. “The farmers don’t know the source of the seed from the market, so they end up planting diseased seed and spreading the wilt to their own soil.”

Because of high population density and small aver­age landholdings — about one hectare per family — most of Kabale’s farmers are unable to practice proper crop rotation and fallow techniques. As a result, soil fertility is diminished and diseases  such as bacterial wilt and  late blight spread more  easily. There is great demand for clean seed in Uganda, but the national potato program cannot meet it. NARO’s Kalen­gyere Research Station produces only about 500 bags (about 40 tonnes) of ‘basic’ seed each season. This is enough to plant just 35 to 40 hectares.

The production of clean seed involves several stages. First, what is known as pre-basic seed must be produced from ‘mother’ plants that are grown under exacting phytosanitary conditions and have been thoroughly tested to ensure that they are free of pathogens. The resulting tubers are then planted in the field to generate basic seed, which can be used for several generations to produce quality seed tubers.

Multiplier effect

NARO and CIP came up with the idea to multiply the effect of the national program by introducing farmer-based seed systems. Such systems are the norm in Andean Latin America, with its long history of potato growing, but were all but unknown in Africa. “What we’d like to see is a gradual im­prove­­ment in the quality of seed through farmer-based pro­duc­tion ra­ther than centralized state action,” explains Peter Ewell, CIP’s regional representative for Sub-Saharan Africa.

The result is the Uganda National Seed Potato Producers’ Association (UNSPPA). It began in 1997 with just 10 farmers who had enough land for adequate crop rotation. Each season since then, the farmers have received clean basic seed from NARO, multiplied it, then sold it to farmers in Kabale and other neighboring districts.

Since it started, UNSPPA has produced as much as 700 bags of improved seed a season and its membership has climbed to 26. CIP and PRAPACE have worked closely with NARO in the selection of appropriate varieties and the production of basic seed. One of UNSPPA’s biggest challenges has been persuading ordinary farmers to buy their more expensive, improved seed rather than getting the cheaper product from local markets or simply using home-saved seed.

“We have set up demonstrations at different locations with local home-saved seed versus the improved seed so that farmers can come and see the difference themselves,” says chairman Stephen Tindimubona. The typical multiplier effect for improved seed here is 10:1, versus 3:1 for home-saved seed. “At the same time, our own fields act as demon­stration fields. When we harvest, people come to see our yields and when they compare them to their own production they see a big difference.”

As well as providing a necessary service to other farmers, UNSPPA members are finding out that
seed production is a profitable venture. In its best season, the association made a profit of 19.6 million shillings (about US$11,700).  Members also are bene­fiting from their ability to market their seed as a group and from the fact that they now can buy reliable fungicides, insecticides and fertilizers collectively from the capital city, rather than depend on the uncertain quality of those available locally.

UNSPPA continues to seek the entry of more farmers into the seed-producing business. The
association is still small and its annual production by no means meets the demand for clean seed nationwide. Experts hope the UNSPPA model can be replicated in potato growing districts throughout the country. A recent three-year, US$30,000 grant awarded to the association will help. The grant is part of a technology-transfer program implemented by CIP on behalf of the Association for Strengthening Agricultural Research in Eastern and Central Africa.

Spreading the work

Meanwhile, a few handpicked UNSPPA members have begun to produce basic seed themselves using stem cuttings from mother plants. Among them is association founding member and treasurer, Ponsiano Santaro.

“I’m expecting to get at least 15 bags of pre-basic seed,” he says. Santaro will then replant that seed to produce 75 bags of basic seed, which he can sell to other association members at 40,000 shillings (US$24) per bag.

Santaro started with 40 mother tubers produced by NARO from pathogen-tested material supplied by CIP. With these, he followed a method that has now become routine. He plants the tubers in small piles of virgin soil a meter apart. After six weeks, when they have sprouted stems to 15 cm, he cuts the tips to encourage branching of shoots. Then, after another week or two, he clips the new branches and plants the resulting shoots in a nursery area. He waits another couple of weeks before transferring these plants to the garden where, after three to four months, they yield basic seed.

The method has been very successful for Santaro. When the town-based businessman decided to go into potato farming, he could not get good seed from local markets and only managed to grow enough potatoes for home consumption. Now, things have changed. Last season, Santaro made a profit of US$750 from seed alone.

The power of knowledge

NARO–CIP farmer field schools also have helped spread the word about the importance of clean seed, disease management and suitable cultural and post-harvest practices. “We were producing in an ad hoc manner,” says one farmer-pupil, Juliet Sanyu. “Now we have learned how to select seeds and how to plant in rows to manage our fields. We are also learning that it is important to produce quality seed.”

Before, using market seed Sanyu would get barely profitable yields of just 2.5 times what she planted. She often lost much of her crop to bacterial wilt, late blight, and other problems. Since October 1999, however, Sanyu has been producing enough to start selling commercially. “We were ignorant about sources of clean seed,” agrees Peninah Arinaitwe, who attended the farmer field school in her village of Nyamiyaga and since has managed to buy two cows with her profits from potatoes. “We would go to the market and buy whatever was available. We didn’t know we could get clean seed. Now other people are realizing that I am producing a really good crop. They are appreciating the value of buying good seed.”

Farmer Kemmani Erinao has also learned how powerful a little bit of knowledge can be. He used to lose half of the potatoes he saved for seed because he kept them on the ground. Last year, he spent US$360 on materials and four months of his own time to build a storage hut. He modeled it on one of the 76 community diffused-light stores built in the past few years by local farmer groups with technical help from AFRICARE through its Uganda Food Security Initiative. More than 100 community groups are producing quality seed for their own use through this program. 

Now, says Erinao, “people are even coming from other villages to buy because they know I have good seed.” For him, as for many other African farmers, quality is convincing.

— reported by Mike Crawley