By Lukie Pieterse, editor and publisher Potato News Today

A life lived where potatoes and people meet

News of Dr Hubert Zandstra’s passing feels, to many of us in the potato community, like the quiet closing of a chapter that shaped our professional lives more than we may fully realise.

As Director General of the International Potato Center (CIP) from 1991 to 2005, he helped transform the organization from a potato-focused research centre into a broader, globally recognised hub for potatoes, sweetpotatoes, Andean roots and tubers, and natural resource management in vulnerable mountain regions.

Under his leadership, CIP strengthened its scientific capacity, broadened its partnerships, and deepened its commitment to smallholder farmers whose livelihoods depend on these crops. He did this not as a loud institution-builder, but as a patient, field-minded agronomist who never lost sight of the human faces behind yield graphs and strategy documents.

From Caqueza to Lima – always starting with farmers

Long before he arrived at CIP’s headquarters in Lima, Dr Zandstra’s work was already reshaping how development agencies thought about small farms. As an agronomist with Canada’s International Development Research Centre (IDRC), he led and co-authored pioneering studies in Colombia’s Cáqueza region, focusing on how to remove constraints to small farm production and design rural development around real farming systems rather than abstract models.

Those experiences gave him a lifelong orientation: start with farmers’ actual constraints – credit, risk, markets, soils, labour – and build technology, institutions and policies outward from there. That farmer-first mindset stayed with him through later roles, including leadership positions in cropping systems research at the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines, where he worked on methodologies for on-farm cropping systems research that are still cited today.

By the time he took up the role of Director General at CIP in 1991, he was already known across the CGIAR system as a practical thinker: more interested in what worked on real farms than in tidy theoretical frameworks.

Building the foundations of CIP’s modern legacy

At CIP, that pragmatism translated into a very concrete legacy. During his 14-year tenure he championed:

• A broadened research agenda that moved beyond potatoes alone to include sweetpotato and diverse Andean roots and tubers, connecting food security to nutrition and agrobiodiversity.
• Stronger work on natural resource management, especially in fragile mountain environments, where soil, water and livelihoods are tightly interlinked.
• A sharper emphasis on linking germplasm, breeding, integrated pest management and farming systems to the needs of national research programs.

One of the most visible symbols of his tenure is the Hubert Zandstra Biodiversity Complex at CIP in Lima, which houses the centre’s global potato and sweetpotato genebank and underpins its cryopreservation work. When CIP recently opened its new Cryopreservation Vault, the organization itself explicitly traced that milestone back to the foundations laid under his leadership.

In a 1991 World Bank / CGIAR review, he described CIP’s approach in simple language that still feels contemporary: “Our strategy has been to help national systems expand production and make it sustainable.”

That sentence captures him well: focused on national systems, on expansion, and on sustainability in the same breath.

Navigating instability with quiet steadiness

It is easy to forget that his years at CIP did not unfold in a calm setting. His tenure coincided with periods of instability and security challenges in Peru. Yet CIP’s global programs continued to grow, its genebank remained secure, and its research footprint expanded in Africa and Asia.

The official CIP tribute notes that his steady commitment to the institution, and to the farmers CIP serves, earned him deep respect among staff and partners, and led to recognitions such as Peru’s Great Cross for Distinguished Service and honorary degrees from universities in Colombia and Peru.

Those honours matter. But in many ways, they simply formalised what people in the CGIAR system already knew: Hubert Zandstra was one of the architects of how we think about roots, tubers and smallholders in a modern, sustainable agriculture framework.

A humble reply to a fledgling “Global Potato News”

My own connection with Dr Zandstra began far from Lima, long before Potato News Today existed as readers know it today.

In 1996, as a newcomer to Canada and a newcomer to the then-young World Wide Web, I launched a modest website with a rather ambitious name: Global Potato News. It was a small online experiment, fed mainly by public information from governments and universities, and built on the audacious idea that potatoes deserved their own global information highway.

I took a chance and sent the web address to Dr Zandstra by email. At that point he was Director General of CIP – a global institution with scientists on several continents. I was, in comparison, one person behind a tiny website with a dial-up connection.

I did not really expect to hear back.

But he replied.

He did not dismiss the idea as naïve. He did not send a carefully worded non-response drafted by a communications office. Instead, he offered something much rarer: genuine encouragement. He supported the vision of an online news hub for the potato world and urged me to keep going as best I could.

For me, that email was a turning point. It said, in effect: Yes, the potato world is big enough for new voices, new channels, new ways of connecting farmers, researchers and industry.

Looking back today, I see that small act of encouragement as entirely consistent with his broader life’s work: making knowledge flow more freely from centres of excellence to the people who need it most.

A meeting in Washington I will never forget

Some time later, our paths crossed in person in Washington, D.C. in the late nineties.

He had flown up from Lima and was staying in a hotel in the U.S. capitol. I travelled from Prince Edward Island in Canada for the meeting and, through a combination of travel logistics and my own human fallibility of not taking the traffic in the capitol into account, I arrived late.

He and his assistant could very easily have rescheduled or cut the conversation short. Instead, they waited. Patiently.

When I finally walked into that room, there was no hint of irritation, no reminder that I was the one who had kept the Director General of CIP waiting. He simply welcomed me, sat down, and gave me his full attention.

We spoke at length about the potato industry, about the role of international research, about the gaps between what happens in experimental plots and what happens on farms and in supply chains. He listened carefully; he asked practical, grounded questions; he shared insights without ever giving the impression of lecturing.

What stayed with me afterwards was not just the content of the conversation, but the tone of it: this was a man who had spent his life at the highest levels of agricultural research, yet he carried himself like a steward rather than a star.

I walked out of that hotel room with the sense that my small corner of the potato information world mattered, and that the larger system – CIP, CGIAR, the research community – could make room for people like me if we stayed focused and did the work.

The way his legacy shows up today

The impact of a life like his is not measured only in titles or buildings that bear his name. It is woven into how we now do potato and sweetpotato work around the world.

You can see his influence in:

• The way CIP and its partners now frame potatoes and sweetpotatoes as climate-resilient crops with roles in nutrition, income, and agrobiodiversity, not just as calories.
• The continued emphasis on national research partnerships, training and information systems that allow knowledge to move quickly between regions and disciplines – something he was already arguing for in the early 1990s.
• The enduring focus on small farms and rural development in places like the Andes, Africa and Asia, echoing his earlier work on living rural development and removing constraints to small farm production in Colombia and beyond.

His own family has described how much impact his career had on global agricultural research, especially in the developing world. That description aligns closely with how many of us in the potato sector experienced his work from the outside.

Saying goodbye, with gratitude

For me, Dr Hubert Zandstra will always be the humble potato steward who answered a stranger’s email about a tiny, early potato website; who waited in a Washington D.C. hotel room without complaint; who treated a fledgling online publisher as a colleague rather than as an inconvenience.

For the wider global potato community, he is the strategist who helped reposition CIP for a world where potatoes and sweetpotatoes are central to climate resilience, nutrition and rural livelihoods; the institution-builder whose name now sits above the Biodiversity Complex safeguarding thousands of accessions for future generations; and the development thinker who kept insisting that sustainability, small farmers and national systems belong at the heart of what we do.

To his family, friends, colleagues at CIP and across the CGIAR system, and to the farmers and communities his work has quietly benefited around the world, I extend my sincere condolences.

I mourn Dr Zandstra’s passing. But I also carry deep gratitude that, at a crucial early moment in my own journey, he chose to respond, to encourage, and to welcome one more voice into the global conversation about potatoes.

May his memory continue to guide us as we try, each in our own way, to be worthy stewards of the crops and people he served so faithfully.

A funeral service will be held on December 20. More information here.

Lukie Pieterse, Potato News Today

Image: Credit Beechwood Funeral Home, Ottawa