Strategic Meetings


Regional Cassava Mosaic Disease Control Plan in Mainland Southeast Asia


GCP21 has initiated in 2010 a series of "strategic Meetings". The concept is to gather a limited set of experts around a specific topic or question, brainstorming together with the goal to produce a list of advises, actions, proposals… These are now called "Road maps".

The principle is to look for gaps in R"D, or organization, or management and to have a set of experts recommending actions to find sustainable and valuable solutions. The hope is that these road maps can then serve as a reference, or a guide for members of the cassava community and for donors to initiate actions to fill the gaps. Initially the topics have been chosen and recommended by the members of the GCP21 Secretariat, but the hope is that ultimately any member of the community could propose topics to be discussed in this manner.

The topics can be very large (ex. Improving the control of cassava virus diseases in Africa) or quite specific (ex. Evaluation, collection and preservation of cassava landraces in East Africa) and could span all along the cassava value chain from the production of cassava roots down to the consumption and use of cassava products.

Ultimately these road maps will constitute a "portfolio" of actions to be done by the community at large and they should be revisited at regular intervals for updates, adjustments, additions or substractions.

The road maps will be published and signed by all participants who participated to the strategic meeting and who endorse the content of the road map.

The key words for this activity are: cassava - gaps – research – development - road map – experts – team work – reference.

The strategic meetings done, or planned to be done, are: