When the water went down, the fields were silt and the granaries were empty. What survived was scattered: a jar of seed here, a handful wrapped in cloth there, saved out of habit by women who had learned not to trust a single harvest.
They brought it together. A shared store, catalogued and dry, with a simple rule — borrow at planting, return a little more at harvest. No interest, only the seed itself, multiplied.
Two seasons on, the bank holds more than any single farm lost. When the district’s suppliers ran short this spring, the most reliable seed in the region was the seed the women had kept.
We did not save the seeds because we were clever. We saved them because we had been hungry before.
Seed-bank member, Sindh
Reliability was not bought in. It was assembled, jar by jar, out of the caution of women who had already survived the worst season and refused to be caught out by the next.
