Globally, many smallholder farmers cultivate crop varieties that have been developed, selected, and maintained over generations, known as farmers’ varieties. This paper examines the policy provisions, existing gaps, and prospects for the registration of farmers’ native varieties in Nepal through systematic review of relevant literature, legislation, regulations, and policy documents. It synthesizes key findings on the procedures for registering native varieties and the institutional and regulatory mechanisms for managing farmers’ seed systems. The finding showed that the procedures for notifying different categories of crop varieties were established under the Seed Regulation (2013) in four schedules (A, B, C, & D). The revised Seed Regulation (2024) further expands this framework through provision of six annexes. Notably, Annex 5 specifically addresses the registration of farmers’ native varieties. Up to date, total of 24 farmers’ native varieties representing ten different crops were officially registered under schedule D (Annex 5 provision of seed regulation, 2024) through the National Seed Board (NSB). These registrations reflect increasing institutional recognition of farmers’ roles in varietal conservation, improvement, and seed system development. Despite notable progress in the registration of farmers’ varieties in Nepal, several policy-level gaps and implementation challenges exist including limited awareness of the relaxed registration provisions among farmers and stakeholders and inconsistent interpretation of registration criteria. This paper proposes an integrated, farmer-centered approach to strengthen the farmers’ variety registration, source-seed maintenance, and benefit sharing mechanisms through clear technical guidelines, capacity building, and coordinated engagement of farmers, government agencies, the private sector, NGOs and other relevant stakeholders.

Keywords

Farmers’ varieties · Source seed maintenance · Seed systems · Policy provisions · Varietal registration

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10722-026-02955-w