Tapping sweetpotato’s potential to improve farmer incomes and resilience in India

Though Odisha is India’s top sweetpotato-producing state, most farmers grow low-yielding varieties of limited nutritional value. The Odisha Directorate of Horticulture and the International Potato Center (CIP) spent four years promoting improved varieties and good agricultural practices in four districts of Odisha, resulting in a 25 per cent growth in the area dedicated to the crop, a 17 per cent increase in farm productivity, and a 40 per cent increase in farmer incomes within the project areas; as well as the introduction of a nutritious, orange-fleshed sweetpotato variety. The project directly and indirectly benefited approximately 6,000 people, and developed a scalable approach that combines farmer capacity development with demand creation, which has potential for reducing hunger, malnutrition and poverty while boosting farmers’ resilience.