Traditional farmer sits beside a potato plot at 3800 metres. He says they're planting at higher altitudes due to climate change.

The lowly spud may seem like the most humble of foods, but it built the glittering empire of the Incas, and it may yet secure the future for billions of people across the globe.

In this special report, Caddie Brain visits the Peruvian farmers playing a big part in one of the world's most unusual food projects.



There’s something very strange about the flight to the ancient city of Cusco in the Andes. There's nearly no descent. The nose of the plane angles up for take-off, then just stays up as you climb into the mountains. Out the window the peaks of the Andes poke through the clouds like knees in a soapy bathtub.

Cusco, the once booming capital of the Inca empire now has a runway down its central valley, and box-like houses sprinkled up the mountains on both sides. It's 3,400 metres above sea level, and with the air so thin up here, it’s not just its beauty that makes Cusco breathtaking.

NTCH potato facts Spud facts: The potato is native to Andes in South America

It is thought to have been domesticated around 8000 years ago

Peru has more than 2,500 varieties of native potatoes in the Andes

Potatoes can grow from sea level up to 4600 metres above sea level

156 countries grow potatoes, including every state in the United States

More than one billion people eat potato on a regular basis

Potato crops cover more than 19 million hectares worldwide

Potatoes are the world's third most important crop, behind rice and wheat

One hectare of potato can yield more food per unit of water than every other major crop, four times that of wheat

China is the world's biggest producer of potatoes, growing more than 88 million tonnes per year

When boiled a single medium-sized potato contains half the daily requirement of vitamin C

This is potato country - the birthplace of the humble spud that probably sits on your dinner plate a couple of nights each week. Its history is firmly rooted in the soil of the Andes.

When the Spanish were draining Peru of all the silver and gold they could, they also took an interest in this hardy little Inca plant, which turned out to be perhaps even more valuable.

From here, the tuber colonised the rest of the world.

Today, more than one billion people eat potatoes regularly. That makes it the third most important crop in the world, after rice and wheat. Potatoes can be grown across vastly different environments, and they produce more food per unit of water than any other major crop.

That's why attention has again turned to the idea of using the potato against the food shortages that many see looming on the horizon.

But to do that, the world once more needs the Incas' help.

On the steep mountainsides outside Cusco, traditional farmers still grow more than 2,500 varieties of native potato, just as their ancestors have for thousands of years.

I have come here to meet these farmers, and to understand the part they are playing in building food security for themselves, and for populations all over the globe.

Potatoes, the ancient way

High in the Andes above Cusco a group of five farming communities have formed a collective called “Parque de la Papa” - the Potato Park.

The 6,500 people who live at the park work its 9,000 hectares as a collective. They want to protect the biodiversity of their crops, especially rare native potatoes. Around them, they’ve seen other farmers subdivide their land smaller and smaller, making it hard to rest it between crops.

Farmers here use traditional methods to till, plant and and harvest. In an average harvest they’ll produce about 4,000 kilograms of potatoes per hectare. Helped by mechanisation and other technologies, Australian farmers produce roughly nine times that.

Most people are in cities, outside the areas where everything’s produced. They cannot talk about climate change because they're not involved in the field. Elisban Tacuri Ccana

There's a potato for everything, even marriage. The 'mother-in-law' potato is peeled by prospective brides as a readiness test for marriage.

There's also a potato suited to every cooking style. Chuno are naturally freeze-dried using a method thousands of years old, that involves exposing the potato to freezing temperatures overnight, covering them again during the day. It preserves the potato for up to 20 years.

But climate change is threatening even the most fundamental traditions.

These farmers say the rains have started to come at strange times of the year. Disease is increasing and varieties are disappearing with warming temperatures. They're having to plant at higher and higher altitudes - but the mountains are only so high.

For a people who time their entire crop production simply by reading the landscape – a change in weather patterns changes everything.

I tell them that many people in Australia don’t believe in climate change. Farmer Elisban Tacuri Ccana, is silent for a really long time. His answer, in Quechua, comes in a calm but firm voice.

"Most of those people don’t know what climate change is," he says, "because they’re not involved in the field. They cannot talk about climate change. They’re in the cities, outside the areas where everything’s produced. But come and see… come and see us and find out."

The world's biggest potato library

Part of the answer for these traditional potato farmers may lie in a room back in Peru’s capital.

On Lima's eastern fringe, next to a potato field behind a high security fence, is the Centro International de la Papa – the International Potato Centre, or "CIP". It’s basically a potato university, with labs, a library, sports grounds - you name it. And everything is potato themed; even the lampshades have potatoes lovingly painted on them.

There are 300 people here researching everything from potato disease to genetics - even which varieties make the best chips. But much of what goes on here revolves around one extraordinary room: the potato gene bank. It looks like the set of a 1960s sci-fi movie, with row upon row of metal shelves, from floor to ceiling, filled with tiny test tubes.

It’s the largest in vitro gene bank in the world. There are 10,000 individuals in tissue culture of over 4,500 varieties of the world's potatoes. In each of the tubes is a tiny plant, sometimes sprouting miniature potatoes the size of peppercorns. The whole collection is backed up in Brazil and the central plateaus of Peru.

Head scientist at the gene bank is David Ellis.

"What we’re trying to do is preserve all the diversity of potato, sweet potato and Andean root and tuber crops for future generations," he says.

"We go through a process that can take two years or longer, and thousands of dollars, to clean each individual variety. This is irreplaceable, the diversity that we have here - we’d never be able to collect it again."

This is irreplaceable, the diversity that we have here - we’d never be able to collect it again. David Ellis

You do wonder: is all of this overkill? If the stakes are as high as these people believe them to be, then maybe not.

In their minds, the spud not only has the potential to feed to world, but feed it well. And they've got the proof.

Gabriella Burgos has spent 15 years researching the nutritional qualities of the potato. Her work involves a lot of myth-busting: that potatoes aren’t particularly nutritious, that they make you fat - notions that Burgos says simply aren’t true.

"Potatoes are a good source of energy – but this does not mean that potatoes make the people fat, [even though] that is something that for a million years has been accepted as right.”

One average-sized potato contains about half an adult’s daily dose of vitamin C – especially if it’s boiled before peeling.

Burgos's lab is working now to develop new potatoes that contain more even micronutrients.

"I am not talking about transgenic here,” she says. “I am talking about conventional breeding, because our major objective is not only to develop potatoes with high levels of micronutrients but also to offer the farmers a set of materials that can grow well, resistant to pests and diseases."

And that could benefit farmers economically as well. Joel Ranck, who works with communications and public awareness at CIP, sees a big role for the potato in giving non-potato farmers a Plan B.

"If you’re a rice farmer you have some very set seasons in a year and your crops are more vulnerable – a hailstorm could wipe out your crop. "Potato, because it grows below ground, is more resistant to that.

"In central Asia one of our priorities in the coming years will be trying to introduce a potato that has a shorter growing season, so 70, 90 or 100 days - so if it’s a rice-based culture where they have two seasons, we’re trying to ask them to see if they can put a potato in there, so if one of their crops fails they can fall back on the potato."

But to do that, they’ll need plenty of good genetic resources to play with. Which is why David Ellis at the gene bank worries about each little potato plant at the gene bank.

"Potato improvement is critical," he tells me later. “And this bank has the genes that the breeders need to get those into the potatoes that we all eat everyday - to feed the world."

But the gene bank needs those Andean farmers - their potatoes and their knowledge.

An eye for an eye: the big potato swap

When I walk into the gene bank the next day it’s unrecognisable. After two long days on a bus down the mountains from Cusco, the colourfully dressed farmers from the Potato Park have arrived in Lima.

They’re here to get a better look at what the gene bank is doing with their potatoes – and also something a bit more special: today the gene bank is giving back to the farmers several hundred varieties of potato it has collected over the last 40 years – varieties that the farmers used to have, but have now disappeared from their region. In return the farmers are donating yet more varieties to the gene bank for preservation.

It's a cause for celebration.

We may be able to address climate change. But how do we convince young farmers to continue with these traditions? Dr Oscar Ortiz

As the handover ceremony starts, with much blowing of deep notes through big seashells, a woman pours a liquid onto the potatoes and drapes a rope around them. Dr Oscar Ortiz, deputy director of research at CIP says it's about capturing the potato spirit.

"That’s part of the ceremony of giving thanks to the spirit of the earth," he tells me. “The idea of tying it is [so] the spirit doesn’t escape, to be maintained in the potatoes for the future cropping cycle. And the spilling of the liquor, the chicha, maize beer, is a way of giving thanks. You know, we are giving to the earth what the earth gives to us."

On the mountain, these farmers told me how worried they were about climate change, but as we watch them dance in coloured circles throughout the auditorium, Oscar says they’re dealing with some even bigger problems.

"The farms [are] getting less and less people, or young people, [with] the willingness to stay and work, because they want to make profit outside of the community. Those challenges are perhaps even more complicated to address. Because climate change, with a good combination of varieties, we may be able to address. [But] how do we convince young farmers to be in the places to continue with these traditions – so that in 100, 200, 300 years potatoes are still there?

"That’s a bigger challenge."

Caddie Brain travelled to Peru with the support of the Crawford Fund, a not-for-profit Australian group that promotes agricultural research in developing countries, and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade's Council on Australia Latin America Relations