The International Potato Center (CIP) has presented two breeding advances it calls breakthroughs, potatoes engineered to resist late blight and diploid hybrid potato breeding, to an Asia-Pacific audience for the first time, at the World Agrifood Innovation Conference (WAFI 2026) in Beijing, the CGIAR centre said in a release on 5 October. Director General Simon Heck noted that the potato is spreading from temperate into tropical farming and that Asia is now the world's largest potato-producing region.
The first advance adds three resistance genes from wild potato relatives, Rpi-blb1 and Rpi-blb2 from Solanum bulbocastanum and Rpi-vnt1.1 from Solanum venturii, into varieties farmers already prefer, such as Victoria, Asante, Shangi, Tigoni, Desiree, Jalene and Unica. Rwanda granted full approval of the triple-stack events in September 2025, with the Sha.105 and Vic.185 varieties expected to be registered in October 2026, and Kenya approved its first event in October 2025.
The second is diploid hybrid breeding with the Dutch seed company HZPC, aimed at high-yielding, climate-resilient, disease-resistant varieties with market quality traits. In Kenya the two are breeding hybrids at CIP's Nairobi hub, run with KALRO and KEPHIS, and in China CIP has a joint laboratory with the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences' Agricultural Genomics Institute at Shenzhen.
CIP's South Asia Regional Center is now operational and is bringing partners in the region into adoption pipelines for innovations such as late blight biotechnology. At the World Potato Congress in Kenya at the end of October, CIP will launch AfricaBlight, a cross-border network against late blight, one of agriculture's most damaging diseases.
"Biotechnology and hybrid breeding are not about incremental improvement, they are about transforming the foundations of an entire industry," Heck said, calling for innovation co-created with each country's farmers and for South-South cooperation.
Photo: Bjorn Andersson (SLU) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Source: International Potato Center
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