Wageningen University & Research — WSER

Seeds,
Systems
& Signals.

I study how seeds move — through fields, markets, gene banks, and digital platforms — and how AI can make that movement more resilient for smallholder farmers from the Sahel to the Indo-Gangetic Plains.

Seed Systems AI Governance RAG / LLM EU AI Act Sub-Saharan Africa South Asia
View Research Projects About Me
Portrait of Arnab Gupta

Arnab Gupta

Senior Researcher & Seed Systems Advisor
Wageningen Social & Economic Research (WSER)
Wageningen University & Research

18+Years experience
45+Countries visited
20+Publications
30+UNESCO sites
🔬 ORCID: 0000-0002-5672-5735 🏛 WUR Profile ✍ Substack Essays 🔗 LinkedIn 📍 Wageningen, Netherlands
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18+Years of seed systems research
12+Countries of active fieldwork
3Core thematic areas
2026CORDiALL Montpellier presentation
What I Do

Research at the intersection
of seeds and systems.

🌾

Seed Systems Development

Integrated seed sector analysis, community seed banks, early generation seed production, and regulatory reform across Africa and Asia — in fragile states and stable markets alike.


See Projects →
🤖

AI & Digital Innovation

RAG/LLM systems for multilingual farm advisory, digital seed portals, AI governance under the EU AI Act, and GDPR-compliant data workflows for development research.


See Digital Work →
📡

Research & Advisory

Peer-reviewed publications, policy briefs, capacity-building courses, and field research across Uganda, Nigeria, South Sudan, Somaliland, Sudan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and India.


See Publications →
Geographic Reach

From the Sahel to the
Indo-Gangetic Plains.

Field research, advisory work, and active projects spanning two continents — always with the same question: how does quality seed reach the farmer who needs it most?

SudanSouth Sudan SomalilandUganda EthiopiaNigeria BangladeshMyanmar IndiaEgypt Netherlands
WUR Active fieldwork Project presence
Recent Work

What's keeping me busy.

2026 · Conference

CORDiALL 2026, Montpellier

Presented on AI for local-language farm advisory services — how RAG/LLM systems can bridge the advisory gap for smallholder farmers in low-resource language contexts.

2026 · Working Paper

Community Seed Banks in Fragile States

ISSD Africa working paper (Gupta & Vernooy, 2026) on community seed banks in Somaliland, South Sudan, and Sudan — seed security under protracted crisis conditions.

2025 · Infrastructure

Local RAG Pipeline

Privacy-first local LLM stack — Mistral 7B + Gemma 4, BM25 hybrid retrieval, cross-encoder reranking — for processing sensitive research data at WUR.

2025 · Essay

"Error as Engine" — Substack

An essay drawing a parallel between software bugs and neutral genetic mutation via Kimura's neutral theory — on AI errors, evolution, and the productive nature of noise.


Read on Substack →
Career Arc

From Pusa to Wageningen.

My work traces a single thread across two decades: understanding how quality seed reaches the farmers who need it most, and removing the barriers — agronomic, institutional, and informational — that stand in the way.

I began with seed physiology at IARI New Delhi, moved through the private sector with Incotec, joined Bioversity International for fieldwork across the Indo-Gangetic plains, and have been at Wageningen since 2019, leading AI and digital innovation for WSER's seed systems portfolio.

Full Biography →
🎓

MSc & PhD — Seed Science

IARI New Delhi
2003 – 2012
🏭

Seed Enhancement Specialist

Incotec, India
2012 – 2014
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Special Project Scientist

Bioversity International
2014 – 2018
🇳🇱

Senior Researcher · AI & Digital Lead

Wageningen University & Research — WSER
2019 – present
Writing

Ideas that don't fit in a journal.

Long reads on seed systems, AI ethics, colonial agricultural history, and the occasional digression into literature, cooking, and genetic mutation theory.

Read on Substack All Writing