Roots and Tubers: the overlooked opportunity. CIP's 2007 Annual Report

CIP's 2007 Annual Report is entitled Roots and Tubers – the overlooked opportunity. Roots and tubers already make a substantial contribution to providing food and alleviating poverty in the developing countries.  We are convinced that they will play an increasingly important role as food for the future, particularly in the vulnerable Low Income Food Deficit Countries.

Despite the large increase in global food production, many individuals and communities do not have physical or financial access to food year round. Vulnerability can be created by many factors, such as natural disasters, remoteness, poverty, marginal ecosystems, pest and disease outbreaks, political instability, climate variability, pandemics and urbanization – and now economic crises.  The World Bank President, among others, has called for a short-term crisis response in addition to our longer-term work to build resilient food systems.  

          Long taken for granted, both the potato and sweetpotato have the potential to ease the pressure of increasing cereal prices for the poorest people and contribute significantly to world food security. In our strategic approach, we are concerned with our ability to respond to short-term crises in an agile way, while maintaining our commitment to the patient, long-term research and development that has a lasting impact on our beneficiaries and collaborators. CIP is not geared towards immediate food relief, but we can react very quickly to provide, for example, potato seed tubers or sweetpotato cuttings that can be producing food at the site of a disaster in a number of months.  

 

          We have organized this 2007 Annual Report to present some of our more successful shorter- and longer-term initiatives.  In particular we provide examples of how we bring the outputs of our research to bear on crisis mitigation in a way that lays the foundation for the longer term rehabilitation and post-crisis development required by these different crisis situations. 

Contents

Introduction
Statement by the Board Chair
Board of Trustees - 2007
Foreword by the Director General

Short term crisis response
Sweetpotato as a cyclone-relief crop in Bangladesh
Managing late blight in Papua New Guinea
A community responds to a late blight crisis in Peru
Rehabilitating the potato crop in the DPR Korea
Long term research and development
Improved potato seed systems enhance farmers’ income in Afghanistan
Processing native potatoes into chips
Partial root drying makes potatoes more water efficient
True potato seed technology answers needs in Nepal and Tajikistan
ISO accreditation a world-first for CIP genebank
New classification system proposed for cultivated potatoes
Golden bread from sweetpotato proves popular in Mozambique
Understanding potato innovation systems
Exporting technology from the Andes to Uganda
Urban agriculture policy reformed through research outcomes
Fighting virus disease in sweetpotato
Predicting the effects of global warming on potato insect pests
T’ikapapa wins the World Challenge 2007

CIP outputs outcomes and impact
CIP outputs - 2007
CIP outcomes - 2007
CIP impacts - 2007
CIP quality and relevance of current research - 2007
Appendix. List of publications

CIP in 2007
Financial report
Donors contributors 2007
Countries in wich CIP is working
Global contact points
CIP’s internal structure
CIP staff list
Centers supported by the CGIAR