Total Iron Absorbed from Iron-Biofortified Potatoes Is Higher than that from Nonbiofortified Potatoes: A Randomized Trial Using Stable Iron Isotopes in Women from the Peruvian Highlands.

Background: Yellow-fleshed potatoes biofortified with iron have been developed through conventional breeding, but the bioavailability of iron is unknown.

Objectives: Our objective was to measure iron absorption from an iron-biofortified yellow-fleshed potato clone in comparison with a nonbiofortified yellow-fleshed potato variety.

Methods: We conducted a single-blinded, randomized, crossover, multiple-meal intervention study.

Targeting market segment needs with public-good crop breeding investments: A case study with potato and sweetpotato focused on poverty alleviation, nutrition and gender.

Crop breeding programs have often focused on the release of new varieties that target yield improvement to achieve food security and reduce poverty. While continued investments in this objective are justified, there is a need for breeding programs to be increasingly more demand-driven and responsive to the changing customer preferences and population dynamics. This paper analyses the responsiveness of global potato and sweetpotato breeding programs pursued by the International Potato Center (CIP) and its partners to three major development indicators: poverty, malnutrition and gender.

Market Intelligence and Incentive-Based Trait Ranking for Plant Breeding: A Sweetpotato Pilot in Uganda.

Crop breeding programs must accelerate crop improvement, spur widespread adoption of new varieties and increase variety turnover they are to meet the diverse needs of their clients. More comprehensive quantitative approaches are needed to better inform breeding programs about the preferred traits among farmers and other actors. However, the ability of current breeding programs to meet the demands of their clients is limited by the lack of insights about value chain actor preference for individual or packages of traits.

Dynamic guardianship of potato landraces by Andean communities and the genebank of the International Potato Center.

Background: Potato landraces ( spp.) are not only crucial for food security and sustenance in Andean communities but are also deeply rooted in the local culture. The crop originated in the Andes, and while a great diversity of potato persists, some landraces have been lost.

The Potato of the Future: Opportunities and Challenges in Sustainable 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 how to produce more food with the same or fewer resources and waste less. Food security has four dimensions: food availability, food access, food use and quality, and food stability.

Quality and psychosocial factors influencing purchase of orange-fleshed sweetpotato bread.

This 2018 study, conducted in six Tusky's supermarkets in Nairobi, Kenya, combined the Just-About-Right, Penalty and Mean-End-Chain analyses to examine the quality and psychosocial factors influencing the purchase of a novel bread made from orange-fleshed sweet potato (OFSP), a biofortified crop, focusing on sixty-one male and eighty female urban OFSP bread buyers recruited at point of purchase. It finds that sensory and psychosocial factors drive purchasing decisions and that some of the bread's sensory characteristics are misaligned with consumers' expectations. It also finds that women and men's evaluations of the bread's characteristics are different, as are their motivations for purchase.

Adoption of potato varieties and their role for climate change adaptation in India.

Adoption of improved varieties is an important strategy to adapt to the negative implication associated with climate change and variability. However, incomplete data on varietal release and adoption is often the reality in many countries hindering informed decision-making on breeding and varietal dissemination strategies to effectively adapt to climate change. In taking the example of potatoes in India, we analyze the extent to which the potato sector is resilient to climate change.

Comparing modeling approaches for assessing priorities in international agricultural research.

This article examines how the estimated impacts of crop technologies vary with alternate methods and assumptions, and also discusses the implications of these differences for the design of studies to inform research prioritization. Drawing on international potato research, we show how foresight scenarios, realized by a multi-period global multi-commodity equilibrium model, can affect the estimated magnitudes of welfare impacts and the ranking of different potato research options, as opposed to the static, single-commodity, and country assumptions of the economic surplus model which is commonly used in priority setting studies. Our results suggestthatthe ranking oftechnolo- gies is driven by the data used for their specification and is not affected by the foresight scenario examined.

Lapses, infidelities, and creative adaptations: lessons from evaluation of a participatory market development approach in the Andes.

Participatory approaches are frequently recommended for international development programs, but few have been evaluated. From 2007 to 2010 the Andean Change Alliance evaluated an agricultural research and development approach known as the "Participatory Market Chain Approach" (PMCA). Based on a study of four cases, this paper examines the fidelity of implementation, the factors that influenced implementation and results, and the PMCA change model.