Role of Women in Seed Saving Impact on Community Resilience

Seeds Saving is the first step to manifest community food resilience. Local seeds’ existence will help farmers manage their agriculture by themselves. Different from hybrid seeds which can’t produce good seeds for the next planting. Moreover, hybrid seeds are a product that creates by industrial agriculture and the big boom agrochemicals. It makes farmers become addicted to seeds in the market. Mongabay launched, these conditions will have a fatal impact on national food resilience.

 

Mothers from Donggala do a presentation about their activity in gardening (Photo: Irsan Laburante)

 

 

Seed Saving for Food Resilience

 

 

Dependency and threatened food resilience show that slowly farmers can’t be independent. This position makes farmers getting away from welfare. Even though Indonesia has several seeds variety. Furthermore, local seeds will easily be adapted to climate change and ecology, so crop failure can be minimized.

 

 

All of the participant in seed saving training (Photo: Irsan Laburante)

 

  

Therefore, local seeds need to preserve for our environmental sustainability, farmers, and ourselves. Seed saving also became one of the IDEP Foundation programs in manifest community resilience. This program involves women's role, especially mothers to do seed saving. Their roles were really important because natural figures of women can protect plants from seeds to become strong plants. The emotive closeness between women and nature can create a harmonious relationship. Same with their softness and responsibility that important to manifest community resilience.

  

 

Women Role in Seed Saving Effort

 

 

Involving women in IDEP programs shows how important is women's role in the community. Seed saving also part of the rehabilitation and recovery efforts of the post-disasters community in Central Sulawesi. In this effort, IDEP collaborates with Lingkar Hijau to held seed saving training in 6 villages: Jono Oge, Amal, Saloya, Taripa, Sumari, and Kumbasa.

 

 

 

Mothers are designing projection about their seed saving activity (Photo: Irsan Laburante)

 

 

Some of the participants are women who have experience in agriculture. Therefore, this training started with sharing sessions about their experience in farming, seed saving, and distributing harvest products. After this session, participants were involved to watch a video about seed saving.

 

 

Seed saving presentation from Lingkar Hijau (Photo: Irsan Laburante)

 

 

From some information that participants get from this training, they involve to cultivate local seeds. Besides environmental sustainability, local seeds also contribute to family food resilience. Moreover, mothers in this training will become seed farmers who include protecting local seeds and ecology sustainability and their community resilience. (Gd)