Abstract:

This paper draws on qualitative fieldwork in Tajikistan and grey literature to examine community-based seed banks as a response to ongoing challenges in the country’s seed sector, arguing that rural women’s interest in engaging with these projects – despite tradeoffs – is indicative of the way that the kitchen garden continues to function as an essential support to social reproduction. NGOs in Tajikistan’s four provinces have recently introduced community-based seed banks as a means of preserving locally adapted open-pollinated crop varieties and, in turn, improving access to appropriate inputs for kitchen garden cultivation, stemming agrobiodiversity loss, and strengthening household adaptation to climate change. Operating on a small scale and with lingering questions about sustainability, organizers nevertheless hope that seed bank structures will support these objectives as national institutions responsible for genetic preservation, seed breeding, and seed production have struggled to recover post-independence – a reality exacerbated by fractured interventions from mainstream development actors. Currently, local markets for vegetable seeds are increasingly dominated by imported F1-hybrid varieties of inconsistent quality, aggravating concerns about varietal loss and frustrating households grappling with income insecurity and risks they associate with purchasing these inputs. By exploring the responses of the development sector and rural households to seed system concerns, this paper offers insight into transformations in post-Soviet space that have, as of yet, received little academic attention.