Global Seed Exports and Imports: Comparisons Between 2015 and 2020

Jan 20, 2023

Each year, the International Seed Federation (ISF) releases its seed statistics that detail the seed exports and imports gathered through internal surveys, international trade reports and knowledge gleaned during visits to various countries. In August 2022, ISF shared its report from 2020.

The report reveals that some of the ‘usual suspects’ — the Netherlands, United States, France and Denmark — remain in the top five or so for export quantity, import quantity, export value and import value when compared to ISF’s report from 2015. France held its spot in the top two for export quantity, export value and import value with 820.819 metric tons, US$2.293 million and US$1.156 million respectively.

Other countries have made significant jumps, either climbing up in rank, or dropping lower on the lists. For example, Slovakia ranked second in export quantity in 2015, yet in the 2020 report, the country dropped down to ninth place. Hungary was listed sixth on the list in 2015 but has now altogether disappeared from the top 10 for export quantity.

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Video: From Students to Solutions | On The Brink: Season 2, Episode 14

Ask Canada’s most decorated soybean breeder his favourite part of the job and he doesn’t name a single variety. He names the students.

Istvan Rajcan is a professor of soybean breeding and genetics in the Department of Plant Agriculture at the University of Guelph, where he has run the soybean breeding program for 28 and a half years. In that time he has developed 87 soybean cultivars, published 140 refereed papers and trained 51 graduate students. In 2025 he received the Public Sector Impact Award from the National Association for Plant Breeding.

He is also worried. In this episode he says Canada is at a crossroads, pointing to recent government cuts to plant breeding programs and to the facilities that support them. His prescription is structural. "Plant breeding funding formula has to be a long-term one," he says.

The formula he is defending is the public-private matching arrangement his program runs on. Private seed companies fund the work, provincial or federal money matches it, and the combined pool stretches each dollar further than either source could alone. At the National Association for Plant Breeding annual meeting in June, he says American public breeders were often surprised at how well that collaboration works in Canada.

He also describes how the people entering plant breeding have changed. His early graduate students came mostly from farms. More recently they include, in his words, "city kids who just became excited about genetics."

Topics covered:

Why public-private plant breeding funding in Canada needs a long-term

commitment rather than a larger one

How matching private seed company investment with provincial and federal

dollars multiplies research capacity

How the graduate student pipeline into plant breeding has shifted from

farm kids to city kids