Introduction
During his 1839 exploration and voyage aboard the H.M.S. Beagle, young Charles Darwin was fascinated by an amazing South American plant that was so adaptable it seemed to defy the very laws of nature. In his log, the great naturalist wrote:
"It is remarkable that the same plant should be found on the sterile mountains of Central Chile, where a drop of rain does not fall for more than six months, and within the damp forests of the southern islands."
The remarkable plant Darwin observed was the POTATO, a gift of South American Indians to the rest of the world.
Today the POTATO is the world's fourth most important food crop and by far its most important vegetable. Cultures that may have very little else in common share the cultivation of potatoes. Varieties of spuds are grown by people in 130 countries around the world and their production in developing countries is increasing faster than that of any other food crop.
Potatoes didn't mean much to me in 1979 when I became the first resident anthropologist at the International Potato Center (CIP), headquartered in Lima, Peru. A potato was still just a potato, and nothing was more boring than a sackful of them. At the time I couldn't have realized that the search for facts about Darwin's remarkable vegetable would take me across four continents, through dense coastal jungles, and into remote mountain villages. That 16-year journey continues today, and the mission remains deceptively simple: to document the dispersal of potatoes throughout the globe and how they have come to impact diverse environments and cultures. I learned that however you slice it, few foods have a more legendary past, natural diversity, fascination to science or a greater potential to feed our hungry planet.The potato's popularity flourishes because of precisely the same characteristic that Darwin scribbled in his notes during his 1839 Beagle expedition: Its adaptibility allows it to prosper in more than a dozen distinct climates , from equatorial mountain slopes that soar 13,000 feet above sea level, to the ocean's edge in tropical Sri Lanka.
Yet more than a century and a half after Darwin wrote of its impressive adaptibility, scientists and laypersons alike still share the misconccption that potatoes are a cool-climate crop suited only to northern latitudes. The potato's diversity continue to elude us. Most Americans--despite our voracious appetites for potatoes fried, mashed, baked or boiled--actually are acquainted with only a handful of the thousands of varieties that thrive in fields and gardens around the world. We know suprisingly little about potatoes grown beyond our borders--or even if we are growing the varieties best adapted to a given climate and soil.
Purpose
Considering the global need for well-adapted, nutritious food crops, underestimating the power of the potato could be a fatal mistake. That's why scientists and farmers are working together to preserve the potato's genetic diversity, to explore its incredible tolerance of climatic differences and to determine which strains grow best in what regions.
With this in mind, I led a small cluster of researchers to track this quarry and map the myriad varieties that thrive from Maine to Manila. The knowledge gained from the effort is important to the future of the crop's cultivation. One result is the new and better matches between potato varieties and climates. Another is the rapid introduction, cultivation and migration of potatoes in developing countries, where inexpensive, wholesome foodstuffs are imperative.
The major research thrust of the International Potato Center is to collect, preserve and develop the many varieties of the potato, Peru's national treasure. The fruits of that labor are distributed worldwide, especially to developing nations that can make quick use of the crop.
Germ plasm--seeds, tubers and other parts that give rise to new plants--should be shipped around the world according to concrete information on climatic zones of producers' needs. Information on the potatoes' agro-ecological zones, diseases, pests, markets and types of producers was needed.
Ideally, that information would be logged on a global computer-aided reference work that scientists, agricultural policy makers and farmers could use to make better informed decisions.
This web site (and its accompanying book) will include data on almost everything about the POTATO, from the history of its introduction in a particular country to how spuds fit into a nation's cuisine. Information on the POTATO--through text files, graphs, and maps--for every country in the world will be found here. This is aimed as a reference work that research scientists, agricultural policy-makers and farmers could use to make better-informed decisions about potato production and use.
I hope you will have a fruitful and enjoyable visit.
