2023 Volume 32 Issue 2 Pages 47-70
The Nepal government has been seeking commercialization of agriculture to improve the problems such as poverty, food insecurity, and migration of young people to foreign countries. However, commercialization has been criticized for benefitting only large landowners, often causing more harm than good to smallholder farmers. In this study, we focused on hybrid seeds as a core technology of commercialized agriculture. The purpose of this study was to document the perceptions of smallholders in Nepal regarding hybrid seeds. This study revealed a change in smallholder cultivation styles. They increased synthesized fertilizers and pesticides after adopting hybrid seeds, which resulted in a shift from cost-free to costly farming. This shift is unfavorable for smallholders especially illiterate farmers because hybrid seeds require a highly knowledge-intensive process. This study also revealed the smallholders' low motivations for continuing agriculture, and risk of extinction of smallholders in rural Nepal.
