Our History
In January 1971, the International Potato Center (CIP) was established in Lima, Peru.
Located in Peru – the cradle of domestication and diversity of the potato – one of the objectives of the Center was to build the world’s most complete collection of potato genetic resources.
The CIP potato collection was initiated in 1973 through a donation of cultivated and wild potatoes from the Potato Research Program of the University Nactional Agraria La Molina (UNALM) and from the Ministry of Agriculture CIPA (now INIEA) collection. Between 1975 and the early 1990s potato collecting missions were conducted throughout the Andes. In 1985, CIP took on the additional responsibility of safeguarding the world’s in-trust collection of sweetpotatoes. And, in 1990, when an important national collection of nine Andean roots and tubers came under threat from the Shining Path violence, CIP took over guardianship of these important root and tuber species.
The donations and collections have resulted in a collection of 4235 native potato varieties, 137 wild potato species, 8025 varieties of sweetpotato, and 1556 varieties of other Andean root and tuber crops. CIP’s genebank holds the largest and most unique collection of potato and sweetpotato biodiversity in the world.
The Board and scientists of the International Potato Center are guardians of this international biological patrimony. The CIP genebank is protected and managed as an “in-trust” collection under the United Nations International Treaty.
This unique collection is very expensive to maintain. In the early history of CIP the funding for the Center and the genebank was received as “unrestricted” funding from development agencies in the developed world. However, by 2005, 75% of the funding received by the Center was in the form of “restricted” special project funding – a phenomenon common to public sector research organizations. It was becoming increasingly difficult to guarantee proper stewardship of this invaluable biological treasure depending upon the shrinking annual “unrestricted” donations from development agencies.
As a result, in October 2007, Mr. Jim Godfrey and Dr. Pamela Anderson established an independent legal foundation – the Roots for Life Foundation – in order to reach out to the public and the private sector for help to protect this irreplaceable collection of biological patrimony.
The first task of the Roots for Life Foundation is to endow the CIP genebank so that we can guarantee future generations will always be able to count on this invaluable source of biodiversity as we work towards solutions to global food security and poverty reduction in a world with intensifying climate change and increasing limitations in water and land.