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Study recommends changes to emergency seed aid

A major study of agriculture in Haiti after this year's earthquake has found that much of the emergency seed aid provided after the disaster was not targeted to emergency needs. The report concludes that seed aid, when poorly-designed, could actually harm farmers or depress local markets, therefore hampering recovery from emergencies.Indeed, agricultural interventions in Haiti should move away from their emergency focus, and confront farmers' longer-term challenges, especially their poor access to new crop varieties.The recommendations follow the first-ever Seed System Security Assessment (SSSA) in Haiti, which saw an international team of researchers, including Dr Shawn McGuire of the University of East Anglia (UEA), look at the impact of the January 12 earthquake on the livelihoods of farming families.The work, carried out across 10 regions of Haiti in May and June, considered how the earthquake affected the resources and activities of farming households in the seasons immediately following the disaster. Ch

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