Colombia: Banking on seeds

By Andrea Egan, Montserrat Xilotl and UNDP Colombia

In the face of increasing climate volatility, the communities in La Mojana, Colombia are rediscovering – and protecting - their native seeds.

There are roughly 100,000 global plant varieties endangered in the world. Extreme weather events, over-exploitation of ecosystems, habitat loss, and a lack of public awareness threaten future plant biodiversity. Conservation techniques, such as the creation of seed banks and seed exchanges among farmers, gardeners, and even nations, play an important role in preserving ancient, heirloom varieties of important food crops. These also play an important role in local food security.

In La Mojana these home gardens and seedbanks are transforming the lives of people.

With great biodiversity comes great responsibility

La Mojana in Northern Colombia is made up of 500,000 fertile hectares in Antioquia, Bolívar, Cordoba, and Sucre provinces, and comprises a complex of rivers and swamps inhabited by more than 400,000 people in some of Colombia's poorest communities.

This flat region is part of the wetland complex of the Momposina Depression, which acts as a regulator of the Magdalena, Cauca, and San Jorge rivers. Its swamps serve to contain floods, buffer droughts, and provide habitat to endemic flora and fauna.

Challenges of climate

As an inland deltaic plain, floods are part of the wetland dynamic, but models predict both floods and droughts will become more frequent and intense. The region has seen temperatures steadily rising - with dry seasons lasting longer followed by sudden torrential rains, leading to flooding, particularly in 2010 when the wetlands were entirely inundated.

Climate-smart agriculture

Following the devastating floods in 2010, a UNDP-supported project, financed by the Adaptation Fund, began working with the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development and local environmental authorities and communities to improve local resilience to climate change.

Building on the success of the original project, a new project funded by the Green Climate Fund (GCF) is now continuing this work - allowing these efforts to be expanded and systematized so that they can then be upscaled both regionally and nationally. 

The region is an important agricultural area that had in the past focussed mainly on rice production and other staple crops introduced to the area. As weather has become more extreme, and flooding and prolonged dry periods have become more intense, many of these crops were on the verge of disappearance - threatening the food security in the region.

After the floods of 2010, and with project support, the community began to cultivate native rice again. The variety chosen was previously abandoned in the 1970s, after the commercial value was deemed to be too low. The community returned to the seed when they understood that the rice planted by past generations was uniquely adapted to local conditions, and could better resist the floods and droughts of La Mojana.

Today they have several cultivated hectares which ensure food security against a backdrop of scarcity. 

Banking on the future by looking to the past

The project works with local communities to identify and reintroduce native crops that have proven to be resilient to both flooding and drought. Cashew, loquat, annatto, and tamarind, among others are native seeds that had fallen into disuse despite being more resistant to erratic rainfall and high temperatures.

To ensure long-term resilience and sustainability, the project began to develop community-managed seedbanks.

Since 2014, project participants have been collecting seeds, whilst seeking input from local elders, who are intimately familiar with flora and fauna, the best times to plant, harvest, and gather seeds.

Elders and children go out to collect them together, because ‘the new generation was blank in the knowledge of the seeds, so it is the grandparents who teach’, says local community member Pedro Arrieta.

In the community’s newly-built seed bank, bottles are catalogued with species’ names, so that locals can sow, distribute, and exchange them with other communities.

By working with communities on the conservation of these seeds, the region was able to reintroduce greater a variety of crops in the region. To date, more than 80 native species have been recovered in the districts of Ayapel, San Marcos, and San Benito Abad in La Mojana.

As a direct result of improved access to a greater variety of plants and seeds, the food on families’ table is more diverse. This means improved nutrition, food security and health.

“With the banks, families generate food, help the recovery of plant species and ancestral and native seeds, which were traditionally cultivated in the region and that were lost due to extreme climatic phenomena. These banks also generate bonds of solidarity because they facilitate the exchange of seeds and a joint work of ecosystem recovery," Diana Díaz, project coordinator.

The seedbanks ensure that the community has access to subsistence crop seeds year-round, which can then be used according to weather conditions - decreasing the need to purchase food commercially.

“This to me was genius, as it ensures that producers not only are planting resilient crops but it also enables communities to have access to the scientific resources needed to upscale and innovate. It also helps communities break free from the dependence on government provided seeds that often are not climate resilient and limit communities to only a couple of crops.” Montserrat Xilotl, Regional Technical Specialist

Home is where the garden is

In Cuenca, the project has concentrated on building vegetable gardens in courtyards.

More sizeable than typical home gardens, these productive household gardens offer enough variety and sustenance to be a secure food source for the entire family. 

Rice, yucca, and banana are planted in circular arrangements, surrounded by ditches to protect them from floods and to preserve soil moisture in times of drought - an adaptation measure that is becoming popular in the community. 

In addition, GCF funds will help identify and categorize this information - and link it to data on yields and costs - ensuring these efforts can be scaled up to occupy an important niche within the value chain. The information gathered from these large home gardens will be shared throughout all 11 municipalities of La Mojana – supporting additional communities in building practical and scientific capacity to protect valuable local seeds as a means of adaptation and food security, while protecting their own regional heritage.

Communities are already seeing economic benefits in the form of reduced food costs (because they spend less on food since their gardens allow them to be self-sufficient) – and for some families they are able to generate income by selling their surplus crops.

Sprouts of change

This work has shown how transformative home gardens and seedbanks are in adapting to climate change. Ongoing work is also serving to catalogue the best practices to used to develop seedbanks, with one such seedbank being slated to be replicated in a project in El Salvador.

"These adaptation measures are of great importance for the implementation of the National Climate Change Policy, since these activities contribute directly to promote agricultural, forestry and fisheries production systems more adapted to high temperatures, droughts or floods, to improve competitiveness, income and food security, especially in vulnerable areas and achieve a low carbon and climate resilient rural development", Jose Francisco Charry, Director of Climate Change and Risk Management, Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development.

The project puts sustainable ecosystem management at the leading edge of disaster risk reduction by promoting healthier watersheds, protecting communities from floods, and supporting poor rural populations to overcome water scarcity during the prolonged dry seasons.

This ecosystem-based approach will also work towards achieving Colombia's Nationally Determined Contributions and a low-emission future, and will serve as a model to implement the first comprehensive climate-adaptive regional development plan. This includes the adoption of a long-term risk reduction strategy based not only on infrastructure but also on restoring ecosystem services.

These services directly contribute to regional water management and regional authorities to manage projected climate risks.

Structuring seed banks for maximum sustainability - along axes of financial viability, demonstrated free market demand, technical comprehensiveness, and uptake by home gardeners - these efforts also serve to empower vulnerable communities, promote productive associations and investment in the region.

By generating and mobilizing alternative rural livelihoods to complement traditional rice production, this project gives clear reason for optimism: community buy-in (seen through community arrangements for sustainability of seed stock and maintenance of infrastructure) is already widespread, and is mirrored by regional government commitments via formal partnership agreements.

These initiatives are also advancing Colombia’s efforts to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In particular, this project supported progress on achieving SDG 1 on poverty, SDG2 on zero hunger, SDG3 on good health and well-being, SDG6 on clean water and sanitation, SDG 13 on climate action and SDG 15 on life on land among others.

For more information on the project, please visit the project profile.