Publications /  Annual Report 2000

The year 2000 presented a series of opportunities, challenges and successes that helped CIP increase our strengths, sharpen our focus and set a clear course for the future. As is appropriate for a millennial year, it was a time of renewal, allowing us to enter 2001, the 30th anniversary of our foundation, knowing that we continue to help reduce poverty and increase food security for the poorest people of the world. Today, annual net return from the Center’s research investment is conservatively estimated at about US$150 million a year. And that is only 30–40 percent of the impact CIP research will have as the full benefits from our breeding efforts begin to be felt around the globe.

Thirty years ago the International Potato Center was founded on the principle of hands-on cooperation. Since that time, we have worked shoulder-to-shoulder with our partners and stakeholders in fields, laboratories and advanced research institutions throughout the world. Today we can attest to the effectiveness of that principal of partnership. Shared goals, work and resources are producing substantive benefits for people in developing nations, as the Stories from the field in this Annual Report so eloquently relate.

Thanks to dramatic growth in potato production in developing countries, poor farmers have been able to increase their incomes, and thereby improve their families’ livelihoods and diversify their diets. Our story from Kabale, Uganda, entitled Convincing quality: Farmer seed systems catch on (page 18) illustrates the many areas of research that converge in farmer-based seed systems to make better lives a reality. Sweetpotato is rapidly gaining recognition as a valuable food for both people and animals and as a source of raw materials for industry. This root crop’s growing importance as a key con­tributor to CIP’s success has been documented in numerous impact studies, and its flexibility can be seen in several stories in this Annual Report. The Andean roots and tubers that we have helped to protect from extinction are increasingly being recognized as important sources of nutrition and income for poor Andean farmers. A case in point is arracacha. CIP’s partnership with the Consortium for Sustainable Development in the Andes (CONDESAN) to develop this crop’s potential is described in Arracacha: A lost crop finds its way to the market (page 30).

CIP’s highly relevant research projects make possible these direct improvements in the livelihoods of poor farm families. In work on potato during 2000, Center scientists identified and improved new sources of resistance to late blight disease from species related to the potato. They bred more than 30 new potatoes, all highly resistant to late blight, and distributed them to a number of developing countries. National programs in developing countries selected at least five new varieties of potatoes from CIP’s plant breeding material and released these to their farmers.

In sweetpotato, biotechnology helped to identify genes associated with desirable traits for yield and use; genetic engineering generated plants resistant to viruses and to a terribly damaging weevil pest; and five native varieties of sweetpotato were released in Africa after farmers, working alongside CIP scientists, helped to evaluate their performance.

Most important, impact studies showed that the full benefits of CIP technologies have yet to be realized. To date, the impact of CIP research has been most visible in the reduction of production losses through improved seed systems, integrated pest and disease management, and post-harvest handling. But a dramatic growth in productivity is beginning to be seen in developing nations around the world thanks to the new varieties resulting from CIP’s research on plant breeding.

Along with these exciting successes, 2000 also presented serious challenges. Early in the year, unexpected commitment reductions from key sources forced CIP management to take rapid action, reevaluating both programs and resource allocation. Although the Center received extra support from donors as well as from the Finance Committee of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), it was clear that this would not be sufficient to cover the losses without also effecting reductions to an already lean budget and, regrettably, staff. After a rigorous review of program prior­ities, we had to let go some 15 percent of our internationally recruited colleagues, including many who had been with us for more than a decade.

CIP emerged from this process with a much sharper definition of its agenda and targets. By reducing the number of projects from 17 to 13, we have been able to increase research integration and regroup our staff into more efficient and effective research teams. Some fine-tuning remains to be done, but we have achieved a great deal and our staff deserve recognition for having wil­lingly shouldered this immense task on top of an already full workload.

In the wider context of CGIAR reform, we are putting into place mechanisms that will help us to set our course for the future, such as regional consultative workshops on our major program areas. We have sharpened our focus on poverty reduction, and will devote greater effort and more resources to programs aimed at directly benefiting the very poor. These include the Strategic Initiative on Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture (SIUPA), the VITAA (vitamin A for Africa) project for increased use of orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes in Sub-Saharan Africa, and the Global Mountain Program (GMP). We have also iden-tified more effective ways of helping national programs and responding to international calls for assistance in disasters.

In the coming decades, the contribution of roots and tubers to satisfying global food needs will continue to grow. As the CGIAR reviews and updates its institutional and programmatic framework, we have no doubt that CIP’s critical role in this growth process will be fully recognized and endorsed. As we help to realize the promise of new technologies, 30 years in the field have shown us that our experience with farmers and scientists worldwide, our extensive networks, and our emphasis on holistic approaches to farming and resources systems will continue to prove critical in providing sustainable solutions.

Today CIP is preparing to meet the challenges ahead in direct consultation with our Future Harvest partners and stakeholders at local, national and regional levels. But we are doing so without losing sight of the bigger picture. The global implications of many of our efforts — in germplasm conservation, urban agri­culture, natural resources management, and late blight, for instance — will provide essential underpinning to our local and regional undertakings.

In closing, I would like to recall that the year 2000 was also a year of cele-bration for CIP. The celebration began in late 1999 with the reaffirmation of our relevance through the signing of an agreement granting the Center full legal status as an international organization. This was followed, in March 2000, by the renovation of our agreement with the government of our host country, Peru. These institutional milestones — commemorated in the book The Potato, Treasure of the Andes — substantiate the excellent relationship that CIP has maintained with its loyal supporters over three decades.

In this Annual Report to our stakeholders, we have brought together testimonies of CIP’s presence in the lives of the people we work with and for in Africa, Asia and Latin America. You will see their faces and read their accounts in the pages that follow. Our research achievements will be reported in more detail in our 1999–2000 Program Report, to be published in September 2000. Meanwhile, we hope these Stories from the field will help to convey CIP’s adherence to our founding principles, their successful application in ensuring better livelihoods, and their value and relevance for the future.

  
Hubert Zandstra
Director General