By Hugo Campos, Deputy Director General for Science & Innovation at the International Potato Center
Potato is an exceptional food. It offers high-quality protein, essential minerals, and vitamins, providing a rich and balanced source of nutrition.
In East Africa, potatoes are primarily cultivated in the highlands, and alongside other crops on small farms. They are a vital component of food security for these communities, as potato production helps bridge the gap during lean periods between the harvests of other local staples, preventing hunger and sustaining livelihoods. They serve as source of income for smallholder farmers, enabling them to meet household needs and generate liquidity for unforeseen farm operations. Potato cultivation is relatively short, with most production occurring during the rainy season.
Looking ahead, potato consumption in East Africa is expected to rise due to increasing incomes and urbanization. Our mission at CIP is to deliver improved potato varieties that support and sustain this growth while ensuring that farmers can cultivate crops that are nutritious, high-yielding, and resilient to climate change. The potato breeding network in East Africa shows how to get there.
Partnerships help meeting the diverse needs of farmers and industry
National Agricultural Research and Extension Systems (NARES) and small agricultural businesses are the pillars of CGIAR’s crop breeding strategy. The development of new crop varieties progresses in close collaboration with these partners, with the goal of transitioning ownership of the breeding process to national and regional entities.
Historically, crop breeding programs have prioritized the release of new varieties aimed at improving yields, with the objectives of enhancing food security and reducing poverty. While these objectives remain crucial, there is an increasing need for breeding programs to be more demand-driven, responding to changing consumer preferences and evolving population dynamics.
In East Africa, for example, the industrial processing of potatoes—particularly in Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda—is limited but rapidly expanding. Companies that process French fries and crisps have specific varietal requirements that differ from those of smallholder farmers.
As this sector develops, we must also keep in mind the millions of farmers also relying on potatoes for their income and daily sustenance. Their needs in terms of skin color, shape, and size diverge from those of the processing industry. For example, while skin color may not be significant for industrial purposes, it is critical for table potatoes. On the other hand, processors will progressively set stricter standards for the raw potatoes they purchase.
At the International Potato Center (CIP), together with Accelerated Breeding Initiative, one of CGIAR’s Initiatives, we are studying the requirements of both processing companies and consumers in the region. We strive to align these needs with our potato breeding efforts, categorizing market segments – for smallholder farmers and the potato processing industry.
The challenge then becomes ensuring that we breed varieties that accurately address the requirements of these market segments, based on objective data rather than assumptions. This is where the Accelerated Breeding Initiative’s methodology, which places partners at the center of our work, becomes invaluable.
Augmenting the role of partners in the breeding process
National partners hold a crucial advantage in crop breeding: they possess deep knowledge of their country’s specific market segments, including the unique challenges, opportunities, and areas for improvement within those markets.
Through bottom-up Product Design Teams (PDTs) facilitated by Accelerated Breeding, partners define the priorities that shape CGIAR’s national and regional breeding strategies – not the other way around.
With representatives from NARES, seed producers, companies, processors, universities and CGIAR Centers, Product Design Teams (PDTs) convene to analyze market segments and design Target Product Profiles (TPPs) – the ideal varieties that meet the set of requirements of a given market segment – and collectively design national breeding strategies. Together, they collaboratively design national breeding strategies, ensuring that the most critical traits are prioritized.
One key element to making exponential progress is building a network where each partner focuses on areas where they have a comparative advantage, which eventually benefits the entire network.
In East Africa, we have established a potato breeding network that brings together national partners from Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, and Uganda, with Tanzania and Nigeria participating as observers. Through the work of PDTs, these partners identified critical traits such as resistance to late blight, bacterial wilt, and potato cyst nematode (PCN), as well as the need for short dormancy, as essential for the future of potato cultivation in the region. They also emphasized the importance of consolidating processing markets in Ethiopia and Kenya and explored potential potato export opportunities, particularly in Ethiopia.
At the regional level, the insights gained from Product Design Teams are shared among representatives from CGIAR Centers and NARES to align regional breeding strategies and define next steps. For the potato breeding network, this collaborative effort included, for example, defining a strategy for biofortification in East Africa.
Similar PDT team meetings are conducted across all crops, such as cassava and maize, ensuring that all breeding programs and national partners working with Accelerated Breeding are effectively responsive to the needs of their markets.
Empowering partners to breed for the future
Another innovation involves improvement plans addressing equipment, capacity building, process management, etc. Breeding programs undergo tier-level assignments, based on assessments conducted by national partners themselves, with CGIAR co-developing strategies to address identified gaps.
Partners within the East Africa potato breeding network have received support for costing, via a methodology scaled up across the other CGIAR-NARES crop breeding networks. Market segmentation training sessions have been conducted across the region. And Uganda benefitted from adoption factor analysis support.
Centers and partners use the improvement plans to clarify their annual work plans. Centers strategically provide sub-grants to NARES, leading, in turn to adjustments in CGIAR’s investment strategies. Common metrics and key performance indicators are established by the networks for each planned objective, ensuring consistent application across countries.
The East African potato breeding network exemplifies a partnership model that is reshaping international crop breeding, with national partners taking the lead. This approach has gained acceptance across crops, with 32 meetings initiated globally by CGIAR in 2022, but then 50 initiated by partners in 2023, and 43 scheduled in 2024. The goal is for all countries to set up Product Design Teams (PDTs) for each relevant crop by the end of 2024. In total, 125 meetings should be organized.
As the work progresses, 42 individuals from various CGIAR Centers have been nominated to implement the approach. The partnership model aims to expand, with plans to conduct 300 breeding program assessments across 55 networks and 6 countries in the next two years.
Our work and the partnerships described have been supported by USAID and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. We are very grateful on behalf of all the female and male potato growing farmers such generous support allows us to serve.