HRH The Princess Royal visits the International Potato Center

HRH The Princess Royal, Princess Anne inspecting some amazing Peruvian native potatoes in the CIP Biodiversity Complex. On the left, Dr. Willy Roca, CIP scientist.

HRH The Princess Royal, Princess Anne visited the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Peru on 9 July 2007.

During the visit, The Princess Royal saw examples of the valuable biodiversity that CIP stores in its genebank and heard about some of the major functions of the Center.

CIP conserves almost 5000 varieties of potato in the largest collection of its type in the world. This irreplaceable material is protected and maintained in trust under the auspices of the United Nations as part of the global heritage for the future. CIP also conserves thousands of varieties of sweetpotato and little known Andean roots and tubers.

The diversity the collection contains is used by CIP scientists, and distributed throughout the world, to develop new varieties that can produce greater yields under specific environmental conditions or resist insect and disease attacks. Such material will also be a valuable source of variation to meet the changed conditions that future climate change may bring.

The Princess Royal also heard about CIP’s work fortifying sweetpotato with vitamins. In Africa, and on other continents, millions of children are at risk of blindness because their diets are deficient in vitamin A. CIP has developed new varieties of orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes and introduced them into over 10 African countries.

They are easy to grow, popular with children and have been proven to increase levels of vitamin A in the blood.
In countries such as Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda, where sweetpotato production is already high, full adoption of orange-fleshed sweetpotato could resolve vitamin A deficiency completely for 85-95 percent of those children most at risk, with significant benefits for childbearing women. Adding as little as 100 g of orange sweetpotato to the daily diet could eliminate or significantly reduce vitamin A deficiency in children and their mothers.

While at CIP, the Princess Royal took part in a pachamanca, a traditional Peruvian cooking ceremony, where potatoes, vegetables and different types of meat are cooked with local herbs in a pit in the ground. During the pachamanca, The Princess Royal discussed the work of the Center with CIP staff, because of her interest in agriculture and her well-known concern for the peoples of developing countries. Potatoes and sweetpotatoes are some of the most important food crops in the world and especially in the diets and livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people in the developing countries.

The United Kingdom has been a major donor to CIP since 1972, both through core support from the Department for International Development (DFID) and through support of a number of special projects operated by CIP, such as research on potato diseases in Peru and Bolivia, and on developing the orange fleshed sweetpotato varieties in Africa.

CIP is a Centre of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). CIP receives its principal funding from a group of governments, private foundations, and international and regional organizations around the world.

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