No abstract

Despite decreasing poverty rates and rising incomes, millions of people in the Asia-Pacific region still face food and nutrition insecurity, particularly in rural areas. There is a pressing need for innovative approaches to help improve the livelihoods of the rural poor, especially in the communities most vulnerable to climate change. The Food Resilience Through Root and Tuber Crops in Upland and Coastal Communities of the Asia-Pacific (FoodSTART+) was a grant project (2015-2019) implemented by the International Potato Center (CIP) with funding by the European Union and IFAD. FoodSTART+ was designed to directly support IFAD's strategic framework 2016-2025, with the specific objective to enhance agri-food system resilience through introducing root and tuber crop (RTC) innovations among poor households in upland and coastal communities of the Asia-Pacific region, which are recognized as the most exposed to the threat of climate change. Through initial scoping studies FoodSTART+ validated the key role of RTCs for food security, livelihood and nutrition of rural farmers, households and communities in the target sites. Furthermore, the project showed that the importance of RTCs in Asia is likely to increase in the coming decades due to the projected change in land suitability amidst climate change which can drive the substitution of other more vulnerable crops, such as maize and rice, by RTCs. Additional assessments confirmed that RTCs play an important role in diverse Asian agri-food systems and contribute to their resilience and capacity to recover from shocks and stressors, including the ones related to climate change and increasingly frequent extreme whether events like typhoons. Additional studies which complemented and expanded the findings of the initial scoping studies, determined the main challenges and opportunities for enhancing production and utilization of nutrient-rich and resilient RTCs and identified the gendersensitive innovations to be prioritized by FoodSTART+.