The India-Africa Seed Summit 2026 opened on 15 September in Hyderabad, bringing together delegates from 44 countries to discuss closer cooperation on seed research, production and trade, according to the summit’s organisers, the Indian Council of Food and Agriculture (ICFA).
The four-day event, running until 18 September, is being held in partnership with the African Seed Trade Association (AFSTA), the National Seed Association of India and the Federation of Seed Industry of India, alongside the International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics (ICRISAT). Organisers said the summit’s central themes are strengthening regional seed systems, encouraging public-private partnerships, and speeding up the development of climate-resilient varieties suited to drought-prone growing regions.
Attendees include Telangana’s state agriculture minister, Tummala Nageswara Rao, and South Sudan’s national agriculture minister, Clement Juma Raphael Mbugoniwia, according to the event’s published delegate list, with representation drawn heavily from India as well as Zambia, Kenya and Ethiopia.
Seed access is one of the more overlooked constraints on food security in both regions. In parts of East Africa and India’s drought-prone belts alike, farmers often rely on informal seed networks or ageing varieties poorly suited to shifting rainfall patterns, a vulnerability that has grown more pressing as monsoon seasons across South Asia and successive rainy seasons across East Africa turn less predictable, a dynamic explored in a related report on the Greater Horn of Africa’s narrowing capacity to absorb repeated climate shocks. Kerala’s own spice farmers face a milder version of the same problem, where perennial crops that take years to mature cannot respond quickly to price or climate signals.
The summit follows a related initiative announced in May by ICRISAT and the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center (CIMMYT), which launched a five-year breeding programme aimed at fast-tracking climate-resilient sorghum and groundnut varieties for dryland farmers in Kenya, Ethiopia and Tanzania, as well as India. That programme, backed by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, aims to cut breeding cycle times by at least two years and make greater use of genomic selection and AI-assisted breeding, CIMMYT said in a statement announcing the partnership.
“No single institution can solve the interconnected food security and climate challenges facing dryland regions alone,” CIMMYT director general Bram Govaerts said at the time. ICRISAT director general Himanshu Pathak said the aim was to build “a new generation of breeding systems capable of delivering faster, smarter, and more climate-resilient solutions for farmers.”
For smallholder farmers across both regions, seed access and quality remain persistent constraints, particularly as rainfall patterns grow less predictable. Organisers of the Hyderabad summit said they hope the event will translate into concrete trade and research partnerships between Indian and African seed companies over the coming year. No specific agreements had been announced by the time of publication, though the scale of the delegate list, spanning ministries, seed companies and research institutes from more than 40 countries, points to an unusually broad base for future cooperation.
Seed sector specialists say durable India-Africa cooperation typically depends on progress on three fronts: harmonised seed certification standards that let a variety tested in one country be approved for sale in another, more reliable cross-border trade logistics, and last-mile distribution networks that actually get quality seed to smallholders in remote districts. Organisers did not detail which of these, if any, featured on the summit’s formal agenda, and the published programme for the remaining sessions was not available at the time of writing.
Both India and the African countries represented at the summit rank among the world’s largest populations of smallholder farmers, a group that seed-sector economists generally regard as the most exposed to the gap between formal, certified seed systems and the informal seed exchange that many farming households still rely on by default. Bridging that gap, rather than any single trade deal, is likely to be the more meaningful measure of whether this week’s summit produces lasting change.
