At FONTAGRO’s 14th Annual Technical Monitoring Workshop, held in the Dominican Republic, project leader Erika Salazar of INIA Chile presented the achievements of three years of work. Five Varietal Supply Centres now operate in four countries, with 108 traditional varieties available and a model for accessing conserved diversity. After 26 training workshops, 120 farmers, more than half of them women, take part in seven multiplication networks with 111 multipliers reproducing 75 varieties of seven crops.

The project also worked with farmers’ organizations and local governments to design two management models for the centres, and generated knowledge through five articles, five theses and participation in conferences and field days. Its results open up new opportunities: there is interest in taking the model to other provinces and regions and in forming a national network of varietal supply centres; in Chile, a proposal was submitted to the Regional Government of the Metropolitan Region, and the experience is a starting point for participatory breeding initiatives and, in the future, for registering local varieties in official seed systems.

📄 Presentation at the 14th Annual Technical Monitoring Workshop, Dominican Republic 2019 (PDF, in Spanish)
🔗 Impact story: Traditional seeds (in Spanish)
🔗 Project page (in Spanish)