Pragmatic progress? Trade-offs and seed choices in Tajikistan

Seed features prominently in the polarised academic and policy debates about the future of agriculture. In this article, we examine maize and cotton farmers’ seed decisions in Tajikistan, where the Soviet-era ideal of industrial modes of agriculture continues to influence farming practices, but where interventions by international actors, along with new paradigms, increasingly affect seed systems. What factors affect farmers’ seed choices, and what notions of agricultural progress do their strategies reveal? Based on extensive fieldwork in lowland Tajikistan, we examine these questions, drawing on political ecology and transition studies scholarship. We consider the state, the market, technology, and crop characteristics and illuminate starkly contrasting seed preferences for maize and cotton. Farmers opt for high-yielding hybrids for the former and relatively low-quality local seed for the latter. In order to explain this apparent inconsistency in seed choices, we address the importance of attending to the context shaping farmers’ seed decisions. These choices reflect pragmatic rather than paradigmatic strategies and challenge presumed dichotomies of distinct development pathways associated with local versus improved seed.