Science Bulletins: Potato Biodiversity – Ensuring the Future

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Science Bulletins: Potato Biodiversity – Ensuring the Future8:56

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Rob DeSalle, Ph.D.
Curator
Division of Invertebrate Zoology
David Randle, Ph.D.
Senior Manager of Professional Development
Education Department

[MUSIC]

Here in Peru, potatoes have a huge cultural meaning.

Potatoes are part of a key diet.

Potatoes are eaten at breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

[MUSIC]

We once asked a farmer here, and he said without potatoes there is no life.

That's what he kind of summed it up.

[MUSIC]

The potato has been part of Andean culture for about 10,000 years.

They first cultivated the potato around Lake Titicaca, which is on the border

between the southern part of Peru and the northern part of Bolivia.

So that is, effectively, where people started thinking about changing

the evolutionary path of potatoes into becoming something that's edible and

that's rich in nutrients.

[MUSIC]

The potato is one of the top crops for food around the world, and

it encompasses a lot of good things, nutritionally.

It has good protein, it has good starches, it also has iron,

and calcium, and many other things that people need for their nutrition.

And a lot of people's livelihoods depend on it as well.

[MUSIC]

But potato biodiversity is under threat from climate change,

from political instability, from urbanization.

There are lots of challenges.

So here at the International Potato Center, in order to address some of these

challenges, we conserve the biodiversity of the potato and

we preserve the genetic resources in test tubes of a lot of the different types of

potatoes that are no longer in existence anywhere else.

We conserve three different kinds of potatoes.

Wild potatoes are what you found before people cultivated potatoes,

so they're very small, they're very bitter, but

they have a very important combination of genes that we want to be able to conserve.

When people started cultivating wild potatoes, and

picking the best of the best, we arrived at what we define as a native potato.

Which is the potato that people have used through the years,

maybe hundreds of years.

Now with the effect of human activity in the world,

there's more rain in some places, there's more heat then was expected, and

so we've bred these native varieties with wild potatoes that contained

maybe disease resistance or heat tolerance.

Those are then called improved potatoes.

[MUSIC]

>> [SOUND] The Andes has always been a very risk prone environment, and

that's why see so much diversity here,

is because the diversity is kind of a response to risk.

It's a risk-avoidance strategy, itself.

>> Hello Don Juan.

>> Good morning.

Good morning, how are you?

Mrs. Sofia hello.

So the purpose of today's visit is to monitor the diversity of potato that is

maintained by the farmers, not in the gene bank, but in its natural environment.

[MUSIC]

>> My father has left me this inheritance of the native potato.

Six hundred varieties with different pulp and colors.

This one is called Morado Pina (Purple Pineapple)

>> Morado Pina?

>> Mmm hmm.

>> What we are doing now with Juan, we are going to each of his rows and

each of his plants, to see which varieties we encounter.

>> This one is called Jalaware.

>> We basically register the varieties according to the naming

that Juan gives us.

We already have a baseline from 2006, 2007, and we aim to compare it.

>> This is incredible.

I've never seen I've never seen this one before.

I've been visiting Don Juan's farm for at least a few years,

and this one suddenly appeared.

Sometimes new things appear.

We don't really know how to explain how they appear or why they appear,

whether it's mutation or whether it's because of sexual crosses,

or it's just a very scarce variety we've never seen it before.

But that's why it is so important to come back to these farms,

because the evolving part and the dynamic part takes place in the fields.

The number-one problem now for farmers is climate change.

We used to be able to plant potatoes at four thousand meters above sea level.

[MUSIC]

Now because it's hotter, the local farmers have had to move up the mountain

a little bit more than, say, 20 or 30 or 40 years ago, to get that cool

temperature which is the appropriate temperature for growing potatoes.

[MUSIC]

But there's just so

much that you can climb up the hill to be able to plant potatoes.

That's why it's very good if you use the improved potatoes that are coming out of

the breeding program, here at the International Potato Center.

A lot of the varieties that we have collected her in the gene bank

are very heat tolerant, because they were collected in an area

that naturally is an environment for that plant to evolve.

[SOUND] >> Okay,

[FOREIGN] >> And so

when breeders want to cross varieties to try to cultivate for heat tolerance,

they look for a plant that has been collected in that type of hot environment,

and so you're introducing genes for heat.

>> Here is the pistil to cross.

>> Nowadays in Peru, the estimate is that about one-third

of the total potato area is dedicated to native potatoes and

two-thirds is dedicated to improved varieties.

>> Let's see what it says.

>> Compared to native potatoes, improved potatoes have higher yields,

they have a cheaper price, they are more accessible to urban consumers,

and they can adapt to changing climates.

>> Take more.

Take more. >> So improved potatoes can feed more

people.

[MUSIC]

I think that the secret to climate adaptation is partly inside of

the biodiversity.

Conservation is dynamic, farmers adapt, they adopt new varieties.

Some may get lost, and other varieties that are stronger and

better adapted to the new conditions will become more abundant.

What's important is that we continue to support farmers in their efforts to

maintain potato diversity under changing conditions.

[MUSIC]

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