Expert-Speak: Are Seedless Fruits Threatening The Future Of African Agriculture?

Billionaires Current Affairs Under 30 Cover Story Focus Lists By Letlhokwa Mpedi , Vice-Chancellor and Principal at the University of Johannesburg Published Sep 5, 2026, 07:45pm GMT+2 (Getty Images) If you walk into just about any supermarket today, seedless fruit sit on the shelf. For the consumer, it is marketed as the better version of the original with less mess and easier eating. It is a small convenience most shoppers never think twice about. But, for the small-scale African farmer, seedlessness is severing the relationship between people and plants that has sustained food systems on this continent for millennia. These seedless fruit varieties are propagated vegetatively through cuttings, grafts, or tissue culture rather than grown from seeds that a farmer can collect and replant. This means a farmer who wants to grow them cannot simply save part of this year's harvest for next season. Instead, they must return to a third-party supplier, where they often have to pay licence fees. This is a profound shift in who controls the means of production, precisely because saved seeds are a foundation in African agriculture. In a landmark study spanning 9,660 seed transactions across six countries and 40 crops, McGuire and Sperling found that smallholder farmers obtain over 90% of their seed through informal channels such as their own stocks or local markets. When a crop cannot be reproduced this way, that entire informal economy is interrupted at its most critical point. For households already operating on thin margins, this loss can be the difference between a manageable bad season and a devastating one. Long before plant breeders' rights and hybrid seed catalogues, African farming communities, and in particular, African women, developed sophisticated systems of seed selection, storage, and exchange. Seeds were chosen for drought tolerance, taste, storage life, and their suitability to local soil. Seeds were shared across households and villages, carried to weddings and funerals and exchanged as social currency that bound communities together. Bezner Kerr's research on seed struggles in northern Malawi describes how this saving and sharing of seed operates as a form of food sovereignty in its own right. It is this same instinct that makes the image of a seed carried in hair so striking. Historians have documented how, before being forced onto slave ships, West African women braided rice, okra, and other seeds into their cornrows. On the other side of the ocean, those seeds took root in subsistence garden plots that enslaved communities kept alongside the crops they were forced to grow. Through oral histories among the Maroons of Suriname and French Guiana, descendants of enslaved Africans who escaped into the rainforest, describe women braiding grain into their hair a second time as they fled plantations. Among these communities, some rice varieties are still known today by the names of the women credited with carrying them to freedom. It is one of the most literal expressions imaginable of indigenous knowledge surviving displacement and dispossession. That history should change how we think about seed regulation today. African universities and African societies hold knowledge systems that are rigorous forms of intelligence in their own right, rooted in Ubuntu's relational understanding of people and land. I often refer to South Africa's hard-won geographical indication protection for rooibos as a template. This is a legal instrument that finally protected a product's provenance after a long international battle, because intellectual property law, as they note, is territorial and rewards whoever registers an idea first, not whoever originated it. That same warning applies to seeds. Across Africa, countries have adopted or face pressure to adopt plant variety protection laws designed largely for commercial breeders. These laws can restrict or criminalize farmers' traditional practices of saving and exchanging seeds while offering limited protection for locally-developed landraces and knowledge. Kenya's seed law, for example, imposed fines of up to KES1 million ($7,724) and jail terms for handling uncertified seeds until the High Court struck down those provisions as unconstitutional in November 2025. Ghana's law still provides for a minimum 10-year prison sentence for breaches of breeders' rights. Such rules sit uneasily with a farming reality in which much of Africa's seeds continue to circulate through informal, farmer-to-farmer exchange, thus making the case for seed regulation that recognises farmers' rights alongside those of commercial breeders. Indigenous knowledge emphasizes that knowledge and sustenance must be kept within reach of the people who need them. Building regulatory frameworks in that way may very well be one of the more consequential forms of food security policy available to African states today. – The writer serves as Vice-Chancellor and Principal at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. By Letlhokwa Mpedi . Letlhokwa Mpedi serves as Vice-Chancellor and Principal at the University of Johannesburg in South Africa. Follow Author