Foreword

The tremendous importance of roots and tubers as a source of income for poor farmers and of food for the rural and urban poor is often overlooked in the debate about improving food security and eradicating poverty in developing countries. Hopefully, the analyses in this report, prepared jointly by the International Potato Center (CIP) and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), will help give these crops appropriate consideration in future deliberations about the global food system at the national and international levels and thereby improve efforts to ensure access to sufficient food and income for all people.

The assessment of past trends, future prospects, and policy options reported here stems from the tradition of joint studies of roots and tubers in developing countries by the centers of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR). While this report builds on that previous collaboration, it also represents the first intercenter effort to produce future projections of demand and supply for these crops.

This research began as a project on potato and sweetpotato, but when a recent intercenter review of root and tuber crops in the CGIAR called for more formalized, albeit still informal collaboration in this area, this initiative became part of a larger activity involving not just CIP and IFPRI, but also the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA), and the International Plant Genetic Resources Institute (IPGRI). The focus of the work also expanded to include cassava and yam. In so doing, this report became the empirical foundation of a broader effort aimed at documenting not just trends and projections but also describing research activities and organizations with the overall objective of providing a vision for research on roots and tubers in the CGIAR.

Gregory J. Scott, Mark W. Rosegrant, and Claudia Ringler have synthesized a significant amount of data and information on roots and tubers in an effort to provide a clearer vision of their past, present, and future roles in the food systems of developing countries. How the production and use of these commodities have changed and will continue to change over time are all the more important to understand because of the contribution they make to the diets and income-generating activities of the rural and urban poor in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. This paper provides a fuller understanding of the prospects of roots and tubers for food, feed, and other uses in developing countries in the decades ahead. In that regard, the authors note that cassava, potato, sweetpotato, and yam will remain important commodities in the coming years, particularly in many of those poorer regions and countries that merit broader international support in their efforts to increase food production, reduce rural poverty, and improve food security while protecting the environment.