Potatoes to be saved for posterity
28 March 2011
Seeds from 1,500 types of South American potato, including white, black, red and yellow strains, are on their way from Peru to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault in the Arctic Circle as a safeguard against losing them in cultivation.
The selections are being gathered together by a potato conservation park in the Peruvian Andes founded in 2005 as a 'living library' of potato genetic diversity, conserving many traditional varieties some of which have unique nutritional or disease-resistant qualities.
Most commercial varieties of potato have their origins in one of Peru's 4,000 cultivars, and potatoes have been grown in the country for 10,000 years: they include bright red 'moro boli', high in antioxidants, and the long banana-shaped 'ttalaco', used in distilleries.
However changes in climate and rising disease levels are threatening traditional methods of cultivation, and the park felt they had to act quickly to prevent these highly vulnerable varieties from dying out.
'Climate change means that traditional methods of maintaining this collection can no longer provide absolute guarantees,' said Lino Mamani, a farmer at the park. 'Sending seeds to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault will help us to provide a valuable back-up collection.'
Svalbard, an unmanned cold storage facility buried deep inside a Norwegian mountain, can only accept seed, so using the tubers for propagation, as is more usual with potatoes, has not been possible. The first stage of the three-year project is therefore to train farmers in pollination techniques to ensure seed is true to type. Three sets of seed will be collected: one set for the Potato Park, to be used for developing more climate-resilient varieties of native potatoes, a second to be stored in Lima, and a third to go to the Seed Vault.