From vision to action:
WorldVeg implements its new Global Strategy 2026-2033 for health, livelihoods and resilience
– 14 January 2026 –
As 2026 gets underway, the World Vegetable Center (WorldVeg) is putting its new Global Strategy into action. The ambitious eight-year plan aims to unlock the power of vegetables for healthier diets, improved livelihoods and greater resilience to climate change.
Developed through extensive consultations with donors, partners, board members and staff, the Global Strategy is grounded in an assessment of the pressures facing food production, distribution, and consumption worldwide. These range from climate stress, urbanisation, environmental degradation, demographic shifts, and geopolitical instability to the need for more nutritious diets.
To translate this assessment into action, the Global Strategy sets out six Action Areas through which WorldVeg will organise its work over the next eight years. These align with multiple Sustainable Development Goals and focus on where vegetable research and development can deliver the greatest impact, while strengthening the Center’s collaboration with farmers, national research systems, and decision-makers. The Action Areas are:
- Climate resilience
- Healthy diets
- Vegetable biodiversity
- Economic empowerment
- Urban food systems, and
- Food safety and loss reduction.
The Global Strategy also addresses the longstanding gap between the growing evidence of the importance of vegetables and the level of attention and investment they receive. For example, vegetables are central to healthy diets and sustainable food systems, yet they continue to receive far less attention and investment than staple crops – an issue recently brought into focus by this new infographic on Global Food Metrics. Against this backdrop, the Strategy sets out a clear, evidence-based framework for action.
“Achieving more nutritious and resilient food systems requires placing vegetables at the core of global efforts,” said Delphine Larrousse, Director of Global Engagement. “The new WorldVeg Global Strategy responds to the urgent and complex challenges confronting funders, policymakers, and all the actors working to reshape food systems. It reinforces WorldVeg’s research leadership and positions vegetables as a central part of the solution for climate resilience, healthier diets, greater equity, and sustainable livelihoods. ”
Building on more than five decades of research excellence, the Global Strategy reaffirms WorldVeg as a global hub for vegetable science and innovation. It aims to deepen the Center’s engagement in Africa, Asia and the Pacific, Latin America and the Caribbean, and aims to double the Center’s annual budget from USD 30 million to USD 60 million.
Specifically, the new WorldVeg Global Strategy:
- creates two core Research Programs: Biological Sciences, and Social Sciences and Nutrition;
- supports the Center’s long-established crop breeding work to improve vital vegetables like tomato, pepper, legumes, eggplant, and cucurbits like gourds and pumpkin. Additional emphasis will be placed on “opportunity vegetables” such as amaranth – particularly in Africa. A major WorldVeg expansion is due on the continent, following the recent announcement of a new WorldVeg research and training facility in Nigeria’s Plateau State, the country’s vegetable heartland;
- addresses challenges and opportunities in vegetable supply, demand, and policymaking via the Center’s Push-Pull-Policy Framework;
- enhances the Center’s Open Science approach by strengthening partnerships with governments, universities, NGOs, and businesses, to develop and disseminate the latest vegetable science. These are likely to include research into biological approaches to crop protection that reduce the need for potentially hazardous agrochemicals, and the use of biochar to boost vegetable production while reducing greenhouse gas emissions; and
- strengthens the Center’s capacity to attract talent by supporting students and young researchers, and sharing knowledge through networks, events and open platforms.
WorldVeg activities that support the new Action Areas include:
- breeding varieties of pepper, tomato, mungbean, eggplant, pumpkin and okra that can withstand heat, pests and disease, as part of the Climate Resilience Action Area. WorldVeg is working closely with the private sector in Asia and Africa to further develop these innovations, with work also underway in Latin America and the Caribbean – from the release of hardier tomatoes in Paraguay, to multi-location trials of sweet pepper in Samoa.
- the launch of the Vegetables4Life Initiative, co-led by WorldVeg, which seeks to collect, conserve and use vegetable biodiversity in 20 global diversity and malnutrition hotspots – part of the Vegetable Biodiversity Action Area. This also supports implementation of the African Union-endorsed African Vegetable Biodiversity Rescue Plan, and encompasses efforts to turn the tide on biodiversity loss and tackle the crisis of neglect in relation to traditional African vegetables.
- the work of the Taiwan-Africa Vegetable Initiative to bring resilient, nutritious traditional African vegetables back to the fields, schools and dinner tables of Eswatini, as a model for scaling up similar activities in Africa, and part of the Healthy Diets Action Area.
- Through projects like Veggies4People and Planet in Kenya and Ethiopia, WorldVeg continues to work to improve farmer incomes and job creation, a key focus of the Economic Empowerment Action Area. By establishing vegetable business networks that link farmers – particularly women and youth – to skills, finance, markets, and sustainable practices, the approach supports inclusive, commercially viable vegetable value chains.
With implementation now underway, the Global Strategy provides the framework through which WorldVeg will align its science, partnerships, and investments over the next eight years.
The long-term strategic funders of WorldVeg include Taiwan, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, Germany, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, and Japan.
Read the full WorldVeg Global Strategy 2026-2033.
