Rising demand for food in low- and middle-income countries is opening up new opportunities for farms and related businesses. This demand is being driven by population growth, higher incomes and urbanization. Rapid change, however, poses a range of environmental, health and equity challenges across the highly heterogeneous farming production systems worldwide.
Helping to ensure hundreds of millions of resource-constrained, small-scale farmers, processors and marketers benefit from these opportunities while addressing environmental and other challenges will be crucial to achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.
The International Potato Center (CIP) has revised its strategy and corporate plan that contribute to this transformational change. Building on nearly 50 years of experience, the revised strategy and corporate plan will guide our work for the next five years. It will help us reposition potato and sweetpotato research-for-development within agri-food systems to increase access to affordable, nutritious food in developing countries, facilitate inclusive growth for equitable employment, and contribute to more sustainable, climate-resilient agriculture.
The plan reemphasizes the alignment of CIP’s institutional goals, objectives and research with priority SDGs and prioritizes socioeconomic inclusion—particularly of women and young people. To increase efficiency and effectiveness, the plan reorganizes CIP’s work around three outwards facing institutional goals:
- Inclusive growth for increased livelihood opportunities
- Improved food and nutritional security
- Biodiverse, climate change-resilient agriculture
Progress toward these goals will be achieved through three programs: two R&D programs on potato and sweetpotato agri-food systems and one that focuses on the conservation of biodiversity, through the CIP genebank.
As population growth, a shrinking natural resource base and climate change make the tasks of ending hunger, malnutrition and poverty more daunting, this revised strategy will enhance CIP’s ability to develop innovative solutions for the most pressing agricultural and development problems and ensure those solutions are adopted at scale.
Learn more about CIP’s revised Strategy and Corporate Plan.