Fair Planet five year plan for Ethiopia

High-yielding hybrid vegetable seeds are not available in Ethiopia. Most farmers use farmer-saved seeds and exchange these seeds through traditional networks. This project aims at the transformation of subsistence farming to an agribusiness approach. To introduce high quality seeds in Ethiopia, Fair Planet has already started a platform with four leading seed companies to evaluate and identify varieties which are most suitable to Ethiopian conditions. In three Vegetable Excellence Centres testing of tomato seeds are already being carried out. Other vegetables will be tested in the coming years. This is called Phase 1 of the programme. The current FDOV project is phase 2 of the programme and builds on the results of phase 1. In this project about 1,000 smallholders farmers will be trained to produce and market high quality vegetables with an expected increase of more than five times the current yield. This large scale demonstration programme will create a market for the high yielding seeds, after which the international companies can start their commercial activities. Two seed companies, Syngenta Seeds and East-West International participate in this second phase. An outreach to 50,000 farmers is foreseen in the project.

The capacity building of small farmers includes agricultural practices, soil solutions, entrepreneurial training and marketing opportunities. This is implemented by the project partners Fair Planet and the seed companies, in cooperation with the knowledge partners Haramaya university and the Wageningen University Research (WUR).

Through these knowledge partners, the project will closely cooperate with CASCAPE, which is a joint programme by the Netherlands and Ethiopia to improve agricultural productivity in Ethiopia. An online training (to be used for train the trainers) will be developed combining the knowledge of seed companies, Haramaya and CASCAPE.