A competitive tender to conserve threatened quinoa varieties in Bolivia and Peru

As part of Bioversity’s work on Payment for Agrobiodiversity Conservation Services, a pilot study tested the effectiveness of a competitive tender process to provide on farm conservation services for threatened quinoa landraces in Bolivia and Peru.

Quinoa is a cereal crop with a long history in the Andes but its diversity has recently become undermined through the replacement of a wide range of traditional varieties by a narrow choice of commercially favoured ones.

The cost to conserve quinoa?

Accurately costing conservation services, to adequately compensate smallholder farmers for cultivating potentially less profitable crop species/varieties or livestock breeds, without overpaying them, can be very challenging. 

Costs may vary significantly between households for different species and varieties, for example, because of variations in social preferences such as taste, and differences in land availability/quality and labour costs. Furthermore, although an individual farmer will understand their own individual costs but a conservation agency will only have a rough idea of what these costs are. Trying to define a fixed payment structure that reflects these differences is problematic for the agency as ‘one size does not fit all’.

Competing to conserve

38 different community based organizations were invited to provide competitive offer to conserve one or more endangered landraces identified on a priority list.

The objective of the tender was to identify least-cost service providers to maintain not only the genetic resource but also the underlying socio-cultural mechanisms that help to sustain it (e.g. seed systems as well as traditional knowledge and culture.

Subsequently 3 key bid selection criteria were:

• the land area under cultivation (environmental effectiveness)
• the number of participating farmers (maintenance of traditional knowledge and culture)
• the number of communities involved (equity considerations, as well as spatial distribution of risk)

The offers revealed important differences in the costs of participation of the different communities in the conservation programme.

This suggests that the savings associated with a competitive tender approach may indeed be significant compared to conventional 'fixed payment' approaches.

More details regarding the tender process and selection criteria can be found in the Research Findings document

For more information, contact:
 Dr. Adam G. Drucker