The potato has the potato!
By Denis Delbecq • October 29th, 2008 in 9:56 · Category: Actuality
Since chandeliers, the potato was especially cultivated in the Western countries. But the simplicity of its culture drew away a sharp increase of its consumption in the South. So as to make one of the weapon to struggle against the food crisis which hits cereals. When the UNO had announced that 2008 would be an international year of the potato, many people had laughed. Until the price of cereals double, or even trebles for the rice, and delays the potato on saddle. His price does not vary, or almost.
The potato is originally from Andes. It is besides Peru which keeps most varieties of the tuber, with 600 of them enter cultivated in the Park of the potato of Cusco, seat of Centro Internacional of daddy, a global research centre. In Africa, where production stagnated in spite of an introduction more than a century ago, she believed strikingly in countries as Rwanda (multiplied by thirteen between 1961 and 2007) when the potato became the second nutritious source of the country, after the cassava. His culture is also in development in Nigeria and in Egypt.
Sign of time, New York Times rappellait some days ago GIANT MCCAIN (not the candidate for presidential election) opened plants in China and in India for two years. While working to multiply outputs to reduce distance between modes of production to the south and to the North. In France, for example, often forty tons of potato per hectare, four times more than in the poor countries are drawn. But Chinese production climbed 50 % between 2005 and 2007, hoisting the country in the first worldwide rank, in front of Russia and India.
Facing food crisis, the potato shows big advantages in term of food security. Difficult to stock and to transport because she gets damaged very quickly in heat, she does not make the object of big worldwide markets where exercise the speculators past masters in art to make climb food courts. Its course is therefore disconnected from that of cereals. Besides, the potential of increase of outputs is raised, what would make a food of capable choice to reinforce the food security of the countries which cultivate it. The organisation of the UNO for feeding and agriculture (FAO) set programmes up to help and to organise the production of tubers in poor countries.
In Peru, the researchers try to perfect virgin seeds of many plague which threaten the culture of potatoes. Because many political leaders still have in mind the big famine which decimated Ireland between 1845 and 1847.
Picture: © Denis Delbecq
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Comments in 
Therefore bigger kinds could be further to introduced there with Taro, soft potato.