About Us

About the Sweet Potato Observatory

The Sweet Potato Observatory is an initiative led by the Foresight and Applied Economics for Impact (FAE) team of Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT), together with the Sweet Potato Program. Its goal is to establish a comprehensive information system that provides key indicators on sweet potato production, trade, and consumption in Latin America and globally.This observatory provides data on the context of sweet potato cultivation in each country, production systems, trade and competitiveness, consumption, industry policies and incentives, technology inventories, and other indicators related to the agronomic management of sweet potato crops in the region.

The platform gathers information from open-access primary and secondary sources from various national and international organizations, whose collaboration is fundamental to creating this database.

FAE is part of the Performance, Innovation, and Strategic Analysis for Impact (PISA4Impact), a multidisciplinary team of economists, sociologists, and data experts conducting socioeconomic research and impact-focused policy analysis. Their efforts strengthen the agri-food systems environment, covering topics such as markets and nutrition, genetic resources, agriculture, livestock, climate change, environmental risks, and agri-food policies. This team supports key actors at each stage of research-for-development projects, promoting resource mobilization, accountability, and progress toward the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The Sweet Potato Program, in turn, develops and disseminates technologies that enable farmers in Africa, Asia, and Latin America to achieve the maximum agronomic potential of sweet potato crops, facilitating access to new markets, minimizing environmental impact, and strengthening resilience to climate change.

Credits

Thanks to all our colleagues in Alliance Bioversity International – CIAT and collaborating institutions for data sharing. Visuals and data from Crops Observatories Alliance may be used as long as a link to https://cropobservatoriesalliance.org is provided together with the following citation:

Crops Observatories Alliance - Sweet Potato: Monitoring open-access data for the sweet potato sector. Version 1.0. Andrade, R.; Benavides G.; Garcia, C.; Hincapie J.; Nasner, H.; Orozco E.; Ossa L.; Pedreros R.; Rivera, T.; Vergara, D. Alliance Bioversity-CIAT, 2025.

*Authors in alphabetical order