[ROAPE] Food security or seed capture? The colonial potato and Africa’s seed wars
It all begins with a potato. Not the kind that nourishes a nation in textbook stories, but a colonial potato. This potato was shipped, tested, rationed, pushed through mission gardens and military supply lines, and ultimately sold as progress.
Source: Review of African Political Economy (ROAPE) | Published: 2026-09-18
Category: 아프리카 정치경제 | Keywords: agriculture, debt, oda
It all begins with a potato. Not the kind that nourishes a nation in textbook stories, but a colonial potato. This potato was shipped, tested, rationed, pushed through mission gardens and military supply lines, and ultimately sold as progress. Tracing that potato across Nigeria’s highlands leads to today’s disputes over seed, debt, law, and who decides what African farmers cultivate.
Seeds are not just seeds. They carry memory, labour, taste, law, power, and often, debt. The colonial potato scheme in Nigeria is significant because it shows how dependency on seeds can develop even before it is codified in law. Nowadays, discussions about seed sovereignty in Africa often centre on patents, plant breeders’ rights, certified seed laws, and agribusiness. However, colonial Nigeria reveals an older method of control: emergency.
In the 1930s and 1940s, British officials transformed the Jos and Mambila Plateaus into experimental sites for growing potatos. Initially, the scheme was small and awkward, driven by European miners, missionaries, and colonial officers seeking familiar food. Then, the Second World War (1939-1945) changed everything. Supply routes were disrupted, troops needed food, and Nigerian highland farmers were forcibly integrated into a larger imperial food plan. An agricultural experiment became part of the British empire’s war effort.
An anthropological base map of Plateau Province reproduced from C.G. Ames, The Gazetteers of Plateau Province, 1932 (Copy in Nigerian National Archives, Kaduna)
The highlands were ideal for the crop. Potatos thrive in cooler conditions, and Jos and Mambila provided the climate colonial agronomists desired. However, these areas were not empty spaces waiting for improvement. They were inhabited, farmed, and politically complex societies with their own crops, markets, and knowledge systems.
Colonial rule altered the dynamics in these regions. Tin mining on the Jos Plateau attracted workers, administrators, and settlers. Demand for European foods increased. Potatos, once a garden crop for expatriates and mission stations, began to seem valuable to the colonial state.
Starting in the 1930s, British officials based in Nigeria began importing seed potatos from Ireland, Britain, Europe, South Africa, the Canary Islands, and the United States. Mission stations cultivated the potatos. District heads distributed the seed. Farmers cautiously tried the crop, incorporating it into local routines where it made sense while rejecting it when it didn’t. The potato became a means of power.
This did not mean that older crops and seed systems disappeared. There was no formal ban, and local farmers continued to grow, save, and exchange seed in various ways. The scheme worked in subtler ways: it altered the rewards. Access to land, labour, credit, official support, and markets began to favour the colonial crop. Imported seed was seen as improved, while farmer-saved seed and local knowledge were pushed to the sidelines. Over time, diverse and adaptable seed systems were narrowed, though not completely erased, by a supply chain prioritising mines, mission stations, military demands, and imperial markets.
Before the Second World War, the scheme was no great success. Some farmers thought potatos were poisonous. Others saw no reason to cultivate a crop with a limited, European-dominated market. A 1937 attempt to sell imported ‘Great Scott’ seed potatos to the Jos Native Authority ended poorly: half went unsold, the remainder was given away, and the scheme lost money.
War transformed failure into urgency. The empire needed food close to military outposts. It aimed to save cargo space and lessen reliance on disrupted shipping routes. Suddenly, potatos on the Mambila and Jos Plateau became crucial.
The war economy and the creation of dependency
Production surged from around 90 tons at the beginning of the war in 1939 to about 1,200 tons by 1943. Seed stores and experimental stations emerged throughout Kagoro, Zonkwa, Kurmin Biri, and Riyom . Colonial science advanced rapidly, too: London-based Kew scientists devised ways to transport sprouting ‘eyes’ of potatos instead of whole tubers, facilitating a steady supply from outside.
Wartime officials did not establish an independent Nigerian seed system; they created a supply chain. Farmers were encouraged to boost production. Yet, this authority remained elsewhere: seed, disease control, imports, and markets remained tied to imperial institutions. Lord Woolton, Britain’s Minister of Food during the war, referred to the potato as an “insurance crop. ” Crucially, however, it served as insurance for the empire, not for Nigerian farmers.
Crisis can establish dependency faster than ordinary commerce. War suspends scepticism. It makes drastic actions appear temporary and pragmatic. It tells farmers change now, repay later, trust the experts; the emergency demands it. Then the emergency concludes.
After the war, potato exports from the Northern Provinces plummeted from 1,732 tons in 1944 to just 100 tons by 1948. Grading facilities were abandoned. Prices fluctuated. Farmers who had adjusted land, labour, and cropping cycles for potatos were left with a system designed for someone else’s crisis.
From colonial emergency to today’s seed schemes
This history directly relates to the present. Across Africa, food security programmes often appear during crises: food price spikes, climate shocks, supply chain disruptions, COVID-19, and the war in Ukraine. Each crisis brings promises of improved seed, fertiliser, credit, technical assistance, and resilience.
The real question is: resilience for whom? The similarities among these schemes are not that they are identical. They aren’t. The key point is the recurring structure: crisis language, external seed, credit, managed markets, official expertise, and rules dictating which seeds are valid and who may use them.
A colonial base map of the Mambila Area reproduced from Nigerian National Archives, Kaduna Yola Prof. 2303 (copy in Nigerian National Archives, Kaduna)
Today, Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) seed systems work presents improved seed as a pathway to more productive, commercial farming. Nigeria’s Anchor Borrowers’ Programme connects farmers to seed, fertiliser, credit, buyers, and payment after harvest. Ghana’s Planting for Food and Jobs has shifted towards input credit recovered through produce. Malawi’s long-standing input subsidies have made maize, fertiliser, and annual funding fundamental to national food policy.
Different programmes, same risk: inputs now, repayment later, markets arranged from above. Farmers are not merely purchasing seed; they are being drawn into packages that link seed, credit, fertiliser, digital registration, and buyers. The language is modern, but the structure echoes older seed-debt agreements.
When dependency becomes law
Emergency schemes can quickly reorganise farming practices. Law can solidify these changes. This is why the work of Genetic Resources Action International ( GRAIN ) and African seed sovereignty movements are important. For over two decades, they have tracked and resisted efforts to align African seed laws with the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants ( UPOV 1991 ) model, designed to strengthen plant breeders’ rights while limiting farmers’ everyday seed freedoms. In simple terms, UPOV 1991 turns seed into protected intellectual property. Breeders gain strong rights over the production, reproduction, sale, and marketing of protected varieties.
Farmers may be allowed to save seed in certain cases, but that freedom becomes an exception rather than a right. The everyday practices that sustain farming—saving seed, replanting it, exchanging it with neighbours, adapting it to local soils, and sometimes selling it in local markets—can become subjects for licensing, policing, or pricing.
Ghana’s long struggle over the Plant Breeders’ Bill illustrates the stakes involved. The bill was framed as modernisation: rewarding innovation, attracting investment, and improving agriculture. Farmers’ groups and civil society organisations cautioned that the real goal was control over which varieties count, who may reproduce them, and how seed moves among farmers.
Zimbabwe faces a similar challenge through reforms linked to The African Regional Intellectual Property Organization (ARIPO ) and the Arusha Protocol . ARIPO presents a regional plant variety protection system as a streamlined method for innovation, registration, and seed trade. Critics view it as a shortcut for instituting UPOV-style rules where most farmers still rely on informal seed exchange.
Zambia’s recent Plant Breeders’ Rights Bill underscores the issue. Agroecology and biodiversity advocates argue that UPOV 1991-aligned reforms undermine farmers’ rights, favour multinational seed companies, and reshape national laws around external standards. Seed sovereignty is not nostalgia. It represents an ongoing struggle over law, markets, and survival.
When compared to the colonial potato scheme, these legal battles form part of the same framework. First comes the promise: better seed, higher yields, food security, climate resilience. Then the package: seed, fertiliser, credit, registration, markets. Finally, the law: protection, certification, enforcement, penalties. Ultimately, seed that farmers once saved, exchanged, and improved can become someone else’s property.
The potato scheme on the Jos and Mambila Plateaus imparts an uncomfortable lesson: dependency doesn’t always present itself as conquest. Sometimes it comes as help, sometimes as emergency relief, and sometimes in a bag of seed. So, the real question is not whether Africa requires better seed, science, or support. It surely does. The question is who owns the system that follows.
If farmers finish a crisis with diminished control over seed, land, markets, and knowledge, then ‘food security’ turns into a polite term for capture. The next emergency should not dictate what farmers cultivate, which seed they purchase, which debts they incur, and whose property their harvests become.