CANADA
An archeologist has harvested blackened 3,800-year-old potatoes in British Columbia.
The crop is uneatable, of course, but proves that North American natives tended gardens during the prehistoric era. The garden is older than the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, found in Greek and Roman texts.
The remains were discovered by University of British Columbia scientists led by Tanja Hoffmann, at an archaeological site called DhRp-52, which lies west of Vancouver.
The site had been underwater for centuries, resulting in good preservation of plants and other organic materials like wooden tools that would have normally disintegrated over such a long time. It was revealed during inspections to build a road.
The site is the first direct evidence of plant cultivation in the prehistoric Pacific Northwest, according to a study published in the Science Advances journal. According to the study, the site showed that plant cultivation did not only exist, but also involved sophisticated engineering techniques used by farmers to control the flow of water.
In all, the researchers dug up 3,767 whole and fragmented wapato plants (Sagittaria latifolia). Today, these plants are not cultivated by farmers, but had long been important to indigenous people.
These are chestnut-sized plants with a texture like potatoes and taste quiet sweet.
The garden did not look like a modern-day potato field; it was watery like today’s rice paddies. The special engineering techniques included, for example, a rock pavement that “formed a boundary for the cultivation” of the potatoes and held them in their growing positions.
Besides this waterlogged garden, the archaeological site also had a dry area where people would have lived. The researchers also found about 150 wooden tools that would have been used to dig out the plants.
Radiocarbon dates from the burnt wood found at the site suggest it dates back to 3,800 years ago and was abandoned 3,200 years ago.
Source: Science Advances
NEW ZEALAND
Potatoes New Zealand Inc. (PNZ) has become the 14th partner organization to join the Government Industry Agreement (GIA) for Biosecurity Readiness and Response.
The value of the New Zealand potato industry is $814 million per annum. There are 169 registered potato growers in the country, producing 479,000 metric tonnes of potatoes in 2015, from 10,700 hectares planted.
Like all other horticulture industries, the potato industry faces a number of biosecurity threats that could damage the industry. One at the forefront of people’s minds at the moment is tomato potato psyllid (TPP).
Source: Potatoes New Zealand
BOLIVIA/PERU
Every French fry, gnocchi, tater tot and order of hash browns humans have eaten in the past 5,000 years can be traced back to one place in the world – northwestern Bolivia and southern Peru.
A paper by UC Merced Professor Mark Aldenderfer and Assistant Project Scientist Claudia Rumold, recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, shows the researchers found the earliest direct evidence for potato consumption in that region between 3,400 and 2,200 years B.C.
They studied evidence from a site called Jiskairumoko, in the Western Titicaca Basin in the Andes mountains of Peru.
Finding evidence of corn, wheat or other seed crops is easier than discovering the remains of root vegetables, because seed crops typically leave bits and pieces even if they have been burned. A potato dropped into a fire will usually burn completely, though.
The archaeologists recovered microbotanical samples – potato starch remains – from grinding stones. They used starch grain analysis, a method that is becoming more common in archaeology, to determine the remains’ botanical identity.
Because the wild ancestor of the domesticated potato is toxic, people had to find ways of reducing or eliminating the toxins; grinding them may be one way to do that. Manipulating crops to breed out toxins is another.
Every scrap of evidence, including potato remains, helps researchers get a more sophisticated picture of the history of our ancestors.
The point of studying the site was to explore the process of hunter-gatherers becoming sedentary, agrarian people who cultivated plants and animals. By the time this site was abandoned in 1300 B.C., the potato had been domesticated.
The site, at about 12,000 feet elevation, has been returned to farmland by the local people; the archaeologists and the Peruvian government could not secure protection for the historic area.
Source: University of California Merced
RAWANDA
The soaring prices of Irish potato seeds has left Rawanda’s smallholder farmers lamenting, triggering efforts by different stakeholders to seek a remedy.
The prices for seeds, now between RWF600 (RWF = Rawandan Franc) and RWF700 (97 cents to $1.13 CDN), are soaring at the time when farmers are getting little from the produce, with the farm price for a kilogram of Irish potatoes now down to between RWF110 and RWF140, according to farmers from the country’s northern and western provinces – the region where the crop is predominantly grown.
Although improved seeds produced by the Rwanda Agriculture Board (RAB) are sold at between RWF300 and RWF320, it reaches farmers at twice the price, a situation that has been attributed to the shortage of the seeds.
The farmers say the gains from their harvest is disproportionate to the investment made, given other costs for inputs like fertilizers, insecticides and labour that they have to cover.
The farmers also contend that if they get affordable and highly productive seeds, they can get good return on investments and consumers can get affordable produce.
Officials at RAB have attributed the situation to the seed multipliers, who have resorted to selling off the improved seeds given to them to multiply, hence creating a shortage.
There are 27 private-owned greenhouses for seed multiplication in the country, and eight operated by RAB.
According to Rwanda Statistical Year Book, annual Irish potato production in Rwanda was over two million tonnes by 2011.
Figures from RAB show that this agriculture season 2017 A, Irish potato was grown on 63,274 hectares countrywide, with expected production of over 1.2 million tonnes based on average produce of 20 tonnes per hectare.
Source: The New Times Rawanda
INDONESIA
The Indonesian government pledged in December 2016 to immediately stop illegal potato imports that have put local farmers at risk.
Currently, the government only allows imports of Atlantic potatoes, a variety used to make French fries and chips. Thus, imports of Granola potatoes, which are planted by most local farmers, are prohibited.
The Indonesian government says it is speeding up efforts to help farmers boost productivity. The ministry, for example, will soon deploy over 1,000 agriculture experts to help potato farmers across the archipelago.
According to Central Statistics Agency (BPS) data, potato imports reached 18,674 tons during the first nine months of 2016, with a total import value of US$8.82 million.
Source: The Jakarta Post
