In Colombia, emphasis was given to developing a delivery system for cassava planting materials, using farmer participation. This encompasses the entire gamut of varietal selection, in vitro cleaning of planting materials, and their rapid multiplication.

The collaborating institutions are:

Fundación para la Investigación y el Desarrollo Agrícola (FIDAR)

The CGIAR's system-wide program on Participatory Research and Gender Analysis for Technology Development and Institutional Innovation (PRGA)

CIAT Agrobiodiversity and Biotechnology Project (BRU)

CIAT, FIDAR, and a farmers' group from northern Cauca (Colombia) have had a history of working together to make tissue culture technology more accessible to and usable by farmers and arising directly from this synergism are:

• A laboratory was set up, and constructed with locally sourced materials at a cost estimated as being 20 times less than that for a conventional laboratory.
• A tissue-culture medium was improvised from domestically available ingredients at costs that were 5 times less than those for traditional tissue-culture media. The propagules' multiplication rate was maintained.

Building on this success is the current CBN and PRGA funded project, which is located at three sites: CIAT's BRU, and two rural communities in the Departments of Cauca and Valle del Cauca in Colombia's Andean Region. The project now seeks to develop and implement an in situ conservation system for native cassava varieties adapted from the low-cost technology, developed by CIAT and FIDAR, to produce in vitro planting materials. This involves cleaning local cassava varieties of pests and diseases by using in vitro techniques. This would ensure, at least in part, food security for local farmers, while preventing loss of agrobiodiversity and allowing local varieties to be more objectively compared with improved varieties.

Research is being carried out in CIAT's BRU and in the two low-cost laboratories located in a farming community in the lowlands of Cauca's hillside area (1100 m above sea level). Some research activities will also be carried out in a second low-cost laboratory to be built in the hillside area of Valle del Cauca, at 1500 masl.

The project conducts its activities as follows:

• With farmers, collect and characterize local varieties according to their economic importance, uses, beliefs, and resistance to the region's biotic and abiotic conditions, using participatory rural assessment methodologies
• Systematize oral knowledge of native cassava varieties in each region
• Deploy pest- and disease-free cassava planting materials in farmers' fields
• Fingerprint cassava clones collected from the field, using molecular markers, and compare these clones with accessions in CIAT's cassava in vitro germplasm bank
• Empower farmers to take charge of the rapid multiplication and distribution of cassava planting materials cleaned in vitro.