Value chain discovery of Canadian participatory plant breeders
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Participatory Plant Breeding (PPB) is an approach to plant breeding for agriculture that puts farmers in the driver’s seat of variety development, with implications for farmer empowerment, decentralization of power in agriculture, and climate change. The University of Manitoba Participatory Plant Breeding Program (in partnership with the Bauta Family Initiative on Canadian Seed Security) has developed farmer crops to the point that they are starting to be commercialized, but questions remain about the socio-economic landscape that these participatory crops will enter. Who will buy them? Why? What barriers will they encounter in entering the market? This exploratory research endeavoured to answer these questions by investigating the value chains of participant farmers – the material path that their crops follow from farmer to eater, the various actors along this chain, and the socio-economic orientation of these actors. It did this through semi-structured interviews and, as a practicum, produced a series of deliverables. An Integrated Project Plan that structured the investigation was developed with project partners and the study indicated the current state of commercial development as well as practical considerations for the continued commercialization of PPB cultivars. Interview data was coded based on broad categories derived from the literature, conversations with project partners, and emergent themes from interviews. Coded content was then used to create detailed farmer profiles and a summary document of the research. Project deliverables included the development of a background report on PPB and commercialization, a summary report of the data including brief case summaries for each farmer, and then detailed farmer profiles. Farmer profiles uncovered the complexity and variety of farmers’ agro-economic contexts, while the summary report demonstrated common patterns in participants’ current value chains, the PPB commercialization prospects within these chains, and the barriers facing commercialization – both institutional and on-farm. Results indicate that PPB commercialization is entirely possible, but must be approached strategically, and in a different way than conventional variety development.