Our rese­arch was embedded into CIP’s glo­bal work on sweet pota­to, and Indo­ne­si­an natio­nal agro­no­mic rese­arch. As an anthro­po­lo­gist, I  bene­fi­ted a lot from exch­an­ge with agro­no­mists and plant bree­ders working for CIP. Once I had set foot in Bogor, in April 1992, I set up a col­la­bo­ra­ti­ve pro­ject orga­nizati­on with Indo­ne­si­an agri­cul­tu­ral rese­arch insti­tu­ti­ons and uni­ver­si­ties.

We built a metho­di­cal frame­work for the stu­dy and orga­ni­zed seve­ral plant coll­ec­tion mis­si­ons, inclu­ding two to West Papua.Most important: the pro­ject team lear­ned from far­mers how they mana­ged their agro­bio­di­ver­si­ty in situ – having built over time an impres­si­ve sweet pota­to varie­tal diver­si­ty as an eco­no­mic, social and eco­lo­gi­cal resour­ce.

For an over­view on sweet pota­to in the Papua high­lands, see CIP’s annu­al report 1994. (pp. 12–15). In CIP’s Pro­gramm report from 1997–98 my men­tor for this work, Gor­don Prain, talks in detail about “Far­mer main­ten­an­ce of sweet pota­to diver­si­ty in Asia” (pp. 317–28). The chap­ter also sum­ma­ri­zes the fin­dings of our sweet pota­to rese­arch with far­mers in the West Papu­an high­lands.