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Seeds of Survival

Developing local solutions to growing problems

At USC Canada we believe that lasting development starts from the ground up, literally. Our flagship Seeds of Survival program supports farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America and helps them to:

  • Stay on their land
  • Grow more food for their families
  • Preserve their local environment



An Ethiopian SoS Success Story
The Wollo Seed Bank

USC’s SoS is working with farmers to launch a very special new community seed bank complex in the Wollo Region of Ethiopia. Watch this short slideshow to learn about this innovative university of the fields on the Eastern edge of the Rift Valley.

The Global Politics of Food
USC Canada’s Executive Director

The Global Politics of Food was the theme of this August’s prestigious conference of the Couchiching Institute on Public Affairs in Orillia, ON. For the closing forum – a look at the future of food – USC Executive Director Susan Walsh delivered a clear and compelling case for a vision of a transformed global food system: Watch her presentation, or read it here (pdf).

Banking Diversity
Community Seed Saving

Seeds. These tiny packets of life carry a priceless inheritance. Each one of these seeds holds infinite potential; deep wells of genetic variety and adaptation nurtured over time. They are the seeds of our survival. Watch this short video to learn more about the critical role that seed saving and seed diversity play in ensuring a stable global food supply, now and into the future.

The Seeds of Survival program started twenty years ago, in a country on the brink of starvation. When a disastrous drought and famine struck Northern Ethiopia in the 1980s, many farmers were forced to eat the seeds they had saved for planting, leaving nothing for the next year’s crops. The SoS Program was launched in this time of crisis to help farmers save their local crop varieties from extinction, and to ensure they would never again be at risk.

Through SoS, scientists and farmers in Ethiopia started working together as equals, preserving and improving local seed varieties and developing new solutions to the age-old scourges of drought, pests, and hunger. Since then, the SoS model has spread and evolved into a global USC Canada program with partners in Bolivia, Burkina Faso, Cuba, Ethiopia, Honduras, India, Indonesia, Mali, Nepal, Senegal, and Timor Leste.

Thanks to the support of people from across Canada, SoS farmers are working on some of the world’s most marginalized lands to improve local agricultural yields, while preserving the soils and seeds upon which all our lives depend.

But we need your help to continue this work. At USC Canada we believe that local solutions to the world’s growing problems lie in farmer’s hands. Please help support the hard work of farmers by donating to this year’s Seeds of Survival campaign. Your gift today will help farmers plant the seeds of their success.

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