Community Seed Bank Nepal (CSB Nepal) is a national platform of 27 community seed banks from all seven provinces of Nepal.
The main goal of CSB Nepal is to promote on-farm conservation and sustainable use of local crop diversity for the benefit of people and nature.
An ad hoc National Coordination Committee of Community Seed Banks (NCCCSB) was formed on 13 March 2013 at the end of the ‘First National Workshop of Farmers’ Organizations Managing Community Seed Banks in Nepal’.
The Second National Workshop on Community Seed Banks of Nepal held from 3-5 May 2018 in Lalitpur recommended getting legal recognition of NCCCSB. Thus, the committee was renamed as Community Seed Bank Nepal (CSB Nepal) and registered as a profit-not-distributing company (Reg. no. 220491/076/077) in August 2019 as per the Company Act, 2006.
Major Objectives of CSB Nepal are to:
The platform member community seed banks are committed to on-farm conservation, utilization, and promotion of local crop diversity. They also provide easy access to quality seeds and planting materials of diverse crop species and varieties for the local community to improve food security and nutrition.
Altogether, the platform member community seed banks have conserved 1,716 local varieties of 75 crop species. They also produce and market approximately 300 metric tons of local and farmer-preferred improved varieties seeds of diverse crops and varieties annually.
The CSB Nepal closely works with the Local Initiatives for Biodiversity, Research and Development (LI-BIRD), the Center for Crop Development and Agrobiodiversity Conservation (CCDABC) under the Department of Agriculture (DoA), and the National Agriculture Genetic Resources Center (National Genebank).
The CSB Nepal also collaborates with the Development Fund, Norway, Bioversity International, Rome, and the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture (ITPGRFA), FAO, Rome.
