The Mudzi district of eastern Zimbabwe has always been dry. Locals have gotten used to its sandy soils and erratic rainfall patterns, and the majority of its population still makes a living through farming, despite the inhospitable climate. But last August, conditions were worse than usual. Farmers watched row after row of corn, their staple crop, shrivel up and die as the “worst drought in living memory” devastated the area.
Sparked by the El Niño weather pattern and exacerbated by climate change, last year’s drought left more than 68 million people across southern Africa in need of food assistance, including nearly half of all Zimbabweans. But while many in Mudzi survived thanks to help from the national government and international donors, including China, others turned to the village of Chimukoko. Here, in a low-slung brick building indistinguishable on the outside from the houses around it, they were able to collect seeds of local drought-tolerant crop varieties, like sorghum, millet, and peanuts, at no cost.
The building, called bhengi re mbeu (which means “seed bank” in Shona, the Bantu language primarily spoken in Zimbabwe), hosts the local community seed bank. It was established in 2017 as part of an international initiative to make agriculture in the area more resilient to drought and extreme weather. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that human-caused global warming could reduce crop yields in southern Africa by as much as 60 percent in the coming decades.
Around the world, some 1,700 known large seed or gene banks store the genetic material from millions of varieties of plants in climate-controlled settings. The most famous — the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in Norway, which won the 2024 World Food Prize — holds up to 2.5 billion seeds. But in places like Zimbabwe, seed banks are taking root at a much smaller, informal scale, including at village levels. The Chimukoko seed bank, for example, holds 20 varieties of seeds, helping Mudzi farmers mitigate the worst impacts of the drought through the use of traditional knowledge that’s been all but abandoned in favor of more industrial agriculture.
“We see community seed banks as centers of agricultural biodiversity,” said Andrew Mushita, an agronomist and director of the Community Technology Development Trust (CTDT), a Zimbabwean nonprofit that promotes food security. Moreover, “these materials are quite key in terms of empowering local communities to produce and own the means of production.”
Local ownership of seeds, Mushita explained, allows access to crops that are suited to the local environment, making them more resilient in the face of climate change — including the drought that hit the country last year. The crops grown from these seeds are also more culturally appropriate, suiting local tastes and traditions, and easy for farmers to access when they are needed most, rather than being subject to market forces. In Mudzi, for example, farmers were able to withdraw seeds from the bank when their own crops failed to germinate due to a lack of rain, allowing them to plant again for the next season. Some farmers had to plant two or three times before the rains finally came.
Community seed banks also encourage farmers to grow a larger number of crops, rather than relying on corn monocropping, which spread throughout the country thanks to government agricultural policies that stem from colonial times. Rising temperatures and unreliable precipitation make this staple of Zimbabwean agriculture more vulnerable to natural disasters, such as drought, said Ronnie Vernooy, an expert in rural development with the global research group Alliance of Biodiversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT).
Despite these benefits, community seed banks faced early resistance from “formal” conservation bodies such as national gene banks, Vernooy said, “based on the idea that this was really something that only highly educated biologists or conservationists could do” in certain conditions, such as special facilities equipped with cold storage.
“But I think that’s now changed, because now community seed banks have really spread all over the world,” Vernooy said. “Even organizations that were opposed are now saying, this is something that we also want to support.”
Since Vernooy joined the Alliance of Biodiversity International-CIAT in 2011, it has made community seed banking a “central part” of its work, promoting the practice in 20 countries around the world. For his part, Vernooy focuses on developing ways to make seed banks more sustainable and studying how they can assist farmers living in areas affected by conflict, such as Somalia and Sudan.
The concept of seed banking goes back to ancient times with farmers saving and sharing seeds through family, community, religious, or ethnic networks. But the modern structure of community seed banks in Africa arose after the 1983-1985 famine in Ethiopia, which killed as many as 1.2 million people and led development specialists to promote seed-banking as a way to increase local autonomy and reduce reliance on national and international supply chains for food.
Since then, community seed banks have been established in countries as diverse as Nepal, Uganda, the Philippines, and Chile. In India, an organization called Navdanya has helped communities collect more than 2,000 drought- and salt-tolerant varieties of rice, while in Peru, Indigenous “seed guardians” are working to preserve the genetic diversity of local potatoes.
In Zimbabwe, the process had a slow start. The first seed bank was established in the eastern Uzumba-Maramba-Pfungwe district in 1999, as the CTDT set out to help reduce farmers’ dependency on hybrid crops and external seed sources, as well as empower women farmers.
The seed bank met with “mixed reactions” from locals, Mushita said, with many struggling to understand how the facility could help the community. Building it required an initial input of unpaid labor that some in the community weren’t willing to provide, and those who doubted its usefulness kept their distance. But eventually, they were able to see the benefits of the seed bank and began to participate more enthusiastically, Mushita said.
By the time the Mudzi seed bank opened in 2017, demand for indigenous seeds had increased, as farmers also learned about the benefits of planting diverse crops. In the eight years that followed, CTDT built an additional 26 community seed banks across Zimbabwe, and is in the process of constructing four more, Mushita said. Although concerns still come up, greater awareness and training through programs like farmer field schools have spread knowledge of the benefits of seed banks, he added.
To establish a seed bank, CTDT works with local authorities and community members in a collaborative process, educating people about the benefits of building such a facility but leaving the final decision on whether to build it up to residents, who come to a consensus through discussions with local leaders.
Over the last several decades, community seed banks have been established in countries as diverse as Nepal, Uganda, the Philippines, and Chile. Photo inside the Jogimara community seed bank in Nepal by Ronnie Vernooy/Bioversity International.
In Zimbabwe, the process had a slow start. But by the time the Mudzi seed bank opened in 2017, demand for indigenous seeds had increased, as farmers also learned about the benefits of planting diverse crops. Photo of seed fair at Chimukoko Community Seed Bank by Michael Major/Crop Trust.
The organization approaches communities located in areas that might hold strong genetic repositories, particularly in drier areas of the country with lower agricultural potential. Agriculturally intensive regions, Mushita said, tend to have lower genetic diversity because crops that grow there don’t need to evolve to survive adverse conditions like droughts.
Once the decision to build a seed bank is made, locals are responsible for acquiring the land and materials necessary to construct the building it will be housed in, while CTDT provides support for the more capital-intensive aspects, such as the interiors of the seed storage rooms. Each seed bank costs about $30,000 to construct, Mushita said.
An elected committee of local farmers makes decisions about how to run the seed bank, including determining which varieties to focus on and developing a schedule for how to distribute the seeds. Farmers typically take out the seeds they need as loans and then return them back with “interest” in the form of additional seeds after the harvest.
The seeds don’t just stay in their local communities. CTDT has also trained farmers to engage in “participatory plant breeding,” selecting the varieties that they believe are the most resilient or highest-yielding and reproducing them to share with universities and the national gene bank. The goal is to diversify the national seed supply by selecting the best varieties from different regions of the country, Mushita explained — making community seed banks the backbone of Zimbabwe’s gene banking program.
So far, the government seems supportive of farmer-led seed banking initiatives like those championed by CTDT. Zimbabwe’s deputy minister for Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development, Vangelis Haritatos, spoke in support of the approach at a workshop hosted in Harare last November. The workshop sought to bring the country’s national policy in line with the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources on Food and Agriculture.
“The government of Zimbabwe recognizes the fundamental role smallholder farmers play in the conservation and sustainable use of plant genetic materials, particularly their role in managing seed, multiplying, breeding and selection, saving and retention, as well as utilization,” Haritatos said.
However, in Zimbabwe, seed banks continue to face legal hurdles. Since they are a relatively new kind of organization, it’s difficult to register them formally, Vernooy said, making support from governments, NGOs, and research organizations essential.
The CTDT is now working with the Zimbabwean government to establish a national policy for community seed banks, Mushita said, which would set up a formal legal structure for the facilities and bring them to each of the country’s 64 districts. University agricultural extensions would also provide technical support and training to farmers under the policy, which is still in the early planning stages. “We believe that if these facilities are established in each and every district, then self-reliance will also increase,” Mushita said.
Despite the challenges, the organization has already seen an increase in crop diversity as a result of its work. Mushita says he has seen farmers growing dozens of different varieties of common crops like peanuts, sorghum, and millet. And though little empirical data exists yet to demonstrate the impacts of seed banks on food security in Zimbabwe, he has seen through personal observations that communities hosting these facilities tend to be more resistant to natural disasters, such as extreme drought.
Research from other countries supports his assessment. A 2023 case study by Norwegian researchers found that community seed banks decisively boosted food security in Malawi by, among other things, helping farmers conserve and access seeds of a rich diversity of crop varieties, enhancing the performance of selected varieties, and supporting agricultural practices that helped them respond to the effects of climate change.
The community seed banks are also helping support the development of new and more drought-tolerant plant varieties on a national and even international level. One organization that collects the most promising seeds from local facilities is the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT), which has a gene bank in Matopos, about 30 kilometers from the southern Zimbabwean city of Bulawayo.
While community seed banks such as the one in Mudzi are typically simple facilities that lack cold storage, a larger budget gives the ICRISAT gene bank access to more advanced technology, keeping seeds preserved for longer at lower temperatures. The organization relies on local farmers’ contributions to breed more drought-tolerant varieties of crops, said Tanyaradzwa Tenesi, a researcher at the ICRISAT gene bank.
“The farmers are the ones who assist with crop diversity,” Tenesi said. “Once they understand the need for it … they are then willing to actively participate in the conservation of this material.”