The invisible essence of potato

It’s the most valuable food the ancient Peruvians have given to the humankind’s wellbeing.

 

By Fidel Torres Guevara

 

No one mistreat, either underestimate, whom admires and respects.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal (Spanish scientist (1852 – 1934), discoverer of the neuronal unity of nervous system).

 

PIURA CITY, Peru – Wild potatoes are not edable. This tuber that was the food support of European Industrial Revolution, one of the four crops planted around the world with wheat, corn, and rice, and currently the banner of gastronomic innovation of Peru, is the product of the energetic and intelligent process of millennial domestication  developed by the Andean-Peruvian societies what got it.

 

The genetic diversity of an organism itself does not guarantee a direct benefit who possesses it. Nature produces sucessive variations. The human being identifies them and enlarge them in determined useful directions for it, generating improved races very different to their wild relatives.

 

This means the utility and finished forms the human being serves from to the species it domesticates does not break out suddenly of the only variability but the accumulative selection process, of the capability to detect, reproduce, select, and spread the most convenient variations to use and hold, transforming such organisms in purely human creations (artifacts) those can not reproduce by themselves yet (Bonavía and Grobman, 1982).

 

The triumph of this intellectual challenge made real in the potato is verified in the selection they made over more than 180 wild species (INIA, , 2005) to domesticate just eight of them, and form a little deck of harvested species which the most of 5000 kinds that are consumed around the world were obtained from, and the most select ones are tasted in Peru’s Mistura gastronomic fair.

 

Native species of domesticated potatoes

Species	PLOIDIA	Qualification	Adaptation
Solanum ajanhuiri	2x=2n=24	papa amarga, uso en chuño	Tolerant to cool temperatures, drought.
Solanum goniocalix	2x=2n=24	papa amarilla, alta calidad	Tolerant to heat and rancha fungus.
Solanum phureja	2x=2n=24	papa criolla	Resistant to diseases.
Solanum stenotomum	2x=2n=24	papa morada alta calidad	Tolerant to cool temperatures and Spongospora fungus.
Solanum chaucha	3x=2n=36	papa huayro, harinosa	Fast growth, light tolerance to rancha.
Solanum juzepzukii	3x=2n=36	papa amarga, uso en chuño	Tolerant to cool temperatures.
Solanum tuberosum (ssp andigena)	4x=2n=48	papas de colores	Slow growth, demi-slow growth.
Solanum curtilobum	5x=2n=60	papa amarga, uso en chuño	Tolerant to cool temperatures.

Reference: SEINPA; semilla básica de papa en el Perú 

 

Facing the climate changes that threaten the existence of the taken today, the Andean families by own initiative hold the reserve of genetics for new kinds of potato that respond to the demand of adaptation, since their on-location conservation banksof native species and management technologies without government -neither foreign- funds, without academic certifications neither international publishing.

 

They hold the competitive possibility of Peruvian agriculture when they persist to keep the eight harvested species  their ancestors domesticated which kinds resistant to extreme heat or cool, to diseases and plagues, fast growth and slow growth, dry matter high content and those with important anti-oxidants are counted from.

 

The contribution of Piura’s Andes

The Andes of Piura also have made a contribution to this collective process of wisdom, today into a new competitiveness scenario, expansion of consumption, growth of potato, and the need of new strategies and innovations for growing potato and keeping their variability on location, the route of clonal multiplication is insufficient or it presents serious limitations of sustainability in regions like Piura.

 

So it’s a challenge of researchers, farmers, and scholars to re-domesticate this species through its sexual spread (Noel Pallais, 1991). This process has been verified in the Andean Plateau of Altos de Frías (Frías District) where keeper families of a high-culture agriculture, through the use of sexual or botanic seeds, increased to 75 the number of their native kinds of potato, adaptable to low-altitude tropical mountains conditions, typical of Peruvian Northern, so they were the innovators of the National Project of On-Location Conservation of Native Plants Harvested and Their Wild Relatives, led by INIA and funded by UNDP between 2001 and 2006.

 

Those same Peruvians, descendants of creators and actual keepers of potato and other food species like ocas (with most iron content than beans), olluco [ojooco] (rich in C-vitamin), mashwa (important protein source), maca (activator of blood stream), chili pepper (important source of A and C vitamins, controller of the bacterie  responsible for ulcers and colon cancer), qinoa, yacon, arracacha, tarwi, kiwicha, and many other food highly valued and desired by the submissive biotechnology, are also the the same Peruvians submitted to outrageous processes of educational, justice, health, right to the water and the land that keeps them  in discrimination, where they create their own jobs and which products feed the cities that exclude them.

 

How to explain this mistreatment and underestimation from the Peruvian Government whom the world admires and respects? The ancient Peruvians began their agriculture 8000 years ago, approximately. Since these times until 1532 AD, they domesticated 180 vegetal food, medicinal, and diverse purposes’ species  (la Peña, 2007). It may be said they created an useful  species every 45 years. Since the Conquest up to date, 488 years have passed and no one has created or domesticated  again.

 

The domestication phenomenom is not isolated – it’s the fundamental element of every set of work systems which we call globally agriculture, around what life meanings of Andean culture were built.

 

To get their purposes, they reran an amazing display of scientific and technological ingenuity based upon the deep understanding of their environment that allowed them to get adaptation results of the diverse species they domesticated through engineering systems that accomplished the same principles like the actual ultimate technologies of western science.

 

The emblematic example of it is the concentric platforms experimental complex of Moray, Cusco Department, where intensive species adaptation tests were run simulating the functions of what today is known as phytotrons in western ultimate technology.

 

The Arguedas Thinking

In 2011, when the centennial of Peruvian Master José María Arguedas’ birth was commemorated, his reflection results completely actual about the Peruvian talents to the universal wisdom, about the dignity of a country like Peru facing the intellectual colonialism. Arguedas was the pitcher of the Andean culture inclusion process into our reality. His betting for building a homeland where the two cultures respectfully, vibing, and abundantly meet is today more vigent than never before.

 

The following exerpt of his thanksgiving to Inca Garcilaso de la Vega Award, granted him in 1968, is heartbreaking and outstanding because of his premonitory thinking, like he had attended to the technological blurriness today in debate, sampled in the unadvantageous integration of transgenic technology, when he exclaimed. “Not in vain, like the so-called common people would say, formed here Pachacamac and Pachacutec, Guamán Poma, Cieza, and Inca Garcilaso, Tupac Amaru and Vallejo, Mariátegui and eguren, the festivity of Coyllur Riti and Señor de los Milagros, the yungas of coast and sierra, the agriculture at 4000 meters, ducks speaking in high lakes where all the insects of Europe would drown. To try imitating from here to someone results something scandalous.”

 

Arguedas, from his vision, expressed the essential of our roots’ wisdom and put in evidence the invisible but most important one – our inner cultural power. Celebrating the Day of Potato without highlighting the role of its creators and the actual situation of its predecessors, is a fact reminding us that the essential is never seen (Cf. The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exúpery). Check out and comment some pictures of Potatoes of Frías (references are in Spanish).

 

Fidel Torres has been a biologist with AgroRed Norte. Edited and translated by Nelson Peñaherrera. © 2011 by Fidel Torres Guevara, where belongs.