Gender topics on potato research and development.

Sustainable Development Goals 5 calls for addressing gender equality and women empowerment by, among other things, eliminating all forms of discrimination against women. At CIP we interpret this to mean strengthening the use of gender approaches in research and ensuring that research products are responsive to the needs of men and women. This chapter reviews lessons learnt over the years on integrating gender into potato research and development. The chapter discusses how gender has been approached in five key themes in potato research, namely (1) conserving and accessing genetic resources, (2) genetics and crop improvement, (3) managing priority pests and disease, (4) access to seed (seed flows and networks), and (5) marketing, postharvest processing and utilization. This chapter discusses how gender relations that favor men influence women’s participation in and their ability to benefit from potato production, marketing, and research for development. The review shows that potato research has been increasingly focusing on social determinants of potato farming because of the realization that purely technical solutions will not solve inefficiencies in potato production. Using a gender relations approach, the chapter attempts to draw out lessons that can contribute to the design of future potato interventions including research aimed at reducing the gender gap in agriculture in general and potato farming in particular

Global food security, contributions from sustainable potato agri-food systems.

In the coming decades, feeding the expanded global population nutritiously and sustainably will require substantial improvements to the global food system worldwide. The main challenge will be to produce more food with the same or fewer resources. Food security has four dimensions: food availability, food access, food use and quality, and food stability. Among several other food sources, the potato crop is one that can help match all these requirements worldwide due to its highly diverse distribution pattern, and its current cultivation and demand, particularly in developing countries with high levels of poverty, hunger, and malnutrition. After an overview of the current situation of global hunger, food security, and agricultural growth, followed by a review of the importance of the potato in the current global food system and its role played as a food security crop, this chapter analyzes and discusses how potato research and innovation can contribute to sustainable agri-food systems with reference to food security indicators. It concludes with a discussion about the challenges for sustainable potato cropping considering the needs to increase productivity in developing countries while promoting better resource management and optimization

Viral Diseases in Potato

Viruses are among the most significant biotic constraints in potato production. In the century since the discovery of the first potato viruses we have learned more and more about these pathogens, and this has accelerated over the last decade with the advent of high-throughput sequencing in the study of plant virology. Most reviews of potato viruses have focused on temperate potato production systems of Europe and North America. However, potato production is rapidly expanding in tropical and subtropical agro-ecologies of the world in Asia and Africa, which present a unique set of problems for the crop and affect the way viruses can be managed. In this chapter we review the latest discoveries in potato virology as well as the changes in virus populations that have occurred over the last 50 years, with a particular focus on countries in the (sub-)tropics. We also review the different management approaches including use of resistance, seed systems, and cultural approaches that have been employed in different countries and reflect on what can be learnt from past research on potato viruses, and what can be expected in the future facing climate change. © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020.Peer reviewe

Network simulations to study seed exchange for agrobiodiversity conservation

International audienceCrop diversity is essential for sustainable development because diverse crops cope better with disease and climate change. A way to maintain crop diversity is to sustain seed exchange among farmers. Network simulations help in establishing which network properties promote crop diversity conservation. Here, we modelled the likelihood that an introduced crop variety will spread in a seed exchange network. The network model is based on published data on a directed network of barley seed flows in seven villages of Northern Ethiopia. Results show that the number of households that can be reached when introducing a new variety depends on the number of outgoing links of the household that first received the new variety. The distribution of the number of both incoming and outgoing links shows a departure from a normal distribution. This trend is explained by the presence of a minority of highly connected households and of a majority of weakly connected households. For the whole network, there is no significant correlation between the number of incoming and outgoing links of households. The findings explain the common observation that individual farmers do not cultivate all varieties present in a seed system. Absence of reciprocal exchange makes such networks less vulnerable to wholesale displacement of farmer varieties by improved ones