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. Among several other food sources, the potato crop is one that can help match all these constraints 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 paper analyses and discusses how potato research and innovation can contribute to sustainable agri-food systems comparing rural and industrial agri-food systems with reference to food security indicators. It concludes with a discussion about the challenges for sustainable potato cropping enhancement considering the needs to increase productivity in rural-based potato food systems that predominate in low-income countries, while promoting better resource management and optimization in industrial-based agri-food systems considering factors such as quality, diversity of products, health impacts, and climate change effects. Research and innovation options and policies that could facilitate the requirements of both rural and industrial potato-based agri-food systems are described.

Summary: This review of the literature on varietal change in sub‐Saharan Africa looks in detail at adoption of new varieties of bananas in Uganda, cassava in Nigeria, potato in Kenya, sweetpotato in Uganda and yams in Côte d’Ivoire. The review explored three hypotheses about drivers of varietal change. There was a strong confirmation for the hypothesis that insufficient priority given to consumer‐preferred traits by breeding programmes contributes to the limited uptake of modern varieties (MVs) and low varietal turnover. Lack of evidence meant the second hypothesis of insufficient attention to understanding and responding to gender differences in consumer preferences for quality and post‐harvest traits was unresolved. The evidence on the third hypothesis about the informal seed system contributing to slow uptake of MVs was mixed. In some cases, the informal system has contributed to rapid uptake of MVs, but often it appears to be a barrier with inconsistent varietal naming a major challenge.

This perspective describes the opportunities and challenges of data-driven approaches for crop diversity management (genebanks and breeding) in the context of agricultural research for sustainable development in the Global South. Data-driven approaches build on larger volumes of data and flexible analyses that link different datasets across domains and disciplines. This can lead to more information-rich management of crop diversity, which can address the complex interactions between crop diversity, production environments, and socioeconomic heterogeneity and help to deliver more suitable portfolios of crop diversity to users with highly diverse demands. We describe recent efforts that illustrate the potential of data-driven approaches for crop diversity management. A continued investment in this area should fill remaining gaps and seize opportunities, including i) supporting genebanks to play a more active role in linking with farmers using data-driven approaches; ii) designing low-cost, appropriate technologies for phenotyping; iii) generating more and better gender and socioeconomic data; iv) designing information products to facilitate decision-making; and v) building more capacity in data science. Broad, well-coordinated policies and investments are needed to avoid fragmentation of such capacities and achieve coherence between domains and disciplines so that crop diversity management systems can become more effective in delivering benefits to farmers, consumers, and other users of crop diversity.

Gender-responsive breeding is a new approach to making sure modern breeding takes advantage of opportunities to improve gender equality in agriculture. Conventional research on the acceptability of modern varieties has scarcely addressed gender differences during adoption studies. Gender-responsive breeding starts from a different premise that adoption and social impact will be enhanced if gender is addressed at early stages of variety design and priority setting in breeding. However, until recently, there was no concrete way to integrate gender considerations into the practice of breeding. This chapter draws lessons for the future from three RTB breeding programs innovating with gender-responsive breeding with a focus on piloting novel tools. The new G+ tools are designed to help gender researchers and breeders make joint, evidence-based decisions about the significance of gender differences for customer targeting and trait prioritization in variety development. Their piloting in the context of each program’s practice of gender-responsive breeding throws light on some valuable good practices that contributed to successful innovation.

Gender relations come into play as women and men engage in a food system under different conditions – whether in production, trading, employment, agribusiness or food consumption: if they have contrasting goals and constraints, or if they develop different strategies based on systematic differences in rights, opportunities and resource endowments. The main remedy promoted for the resultant gender gaps in technology adoption and productivity are “equal access” policies designed to level the playing field for rural men and women in terms of their access to land, capital, markets and development services. The assumption of the equal access approach is that closing the gender gap means that male and female farmers can and will adopt the same technology. This chapter questions this approach by examining the case for a diversity of agricultural technologies, some of which may be gender neutral, but others of which may purposively incorporate a gender bias in favor of women. Our question is whether there is a rationale for the design of technologies that deliberately target men and women differently without condemning either to relative disadvantage. Plant breeding provides a useful process with which to explore the case for gender-responsive diversity of technology. User acceptance of the end products of breeding is often heavily dependent on preferences for varietal traits which can be differentiated by gender. We review 39 case studies which have examined gender-differentiated plant trait preferences. The studies consistently evidence a number of traits that are given more importance by women. Further analysis of the cases shows that some preferences such as the priority given to quality traits are strongly expressed by women and associated with their traditional responsibilities for food preparation, but may be equally important to men. The evidence from these studies does not lead to the conclusion that breeders need to develop varieties specifically for women, but it does suggest the importance of ensuring that adaptation and use traits important for women are represented in breeding material.

ISHS II International Symposium on Underutilized Plant Species: Crops for the Future - Beyond Food Security EXPERIENCES AND LESSONS LEARNED IN THE FRAMEWORK OF A GLOBAL UN EFFORT IN SUPPORT OF NEGLECTED AND UNDERUTILIZED SPECIES