“Smart” potatoes, Bolivia’s key to climate change

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Climate change has forced several Bolivian potato farmers to combine ancestral knowledge with “climate-smart practices” in order to salvage the tuber’s native varieties, capable of adapting to cold and drought.

The change “has significantly affected potato production (…) production has not been very good, it has also impacted our economy because potato prices have dropped,” said Leonel Mejía, a 14-year-old farmer.

Mejía, a farmer since he was 11 years old, is known in the municipality of Patacamaya, in the La Paz department’s highlands, for the knowledge he developed during the pandemic about native potato varieties and their properties.

He also said that potato farming, which many families rely on for their livelihood, is struggling with the development of fast-growing commercial varieties to the detriment of those grown by the community’s grandparents, which are tending to disappear.

“With the pandemic we are revaluing native potatoes,” he said while detailing the tubers’ qualities for use in flour, to accompany salads, for cooking in the soil, or for gourmet cooking.

LOCAL KNOWLEDGE AND CROPS

Martha Bautista, a 60-year-old female farmer from La Paz’s Aroma province said that this year “there has been no rain” and that the potato fields remained planted with no sprouts and that in these communities “no potatoes have been harvested.”

Bautista explained that the production cycle is very marked, that potatoes in the highlands must be planted between October and November 20 each year at the latest, because after that the crop “will not grow.”

New potatoes sprout between March and April, harvest is done in May so that other crops such as barley and quinoa can be planted, and after that “the land must rest for five years,” according to the ancestral “aynuqa” method used in their community, which dictates the plot rotation.

According to local knowledge, potatoes are planted first in October and also close to the limit in case frost comes and wipes out the first crops, so that a reserve is kept to survive the rest of the year while separating the potatoes used for seed, for “chuño” (the dehydrated form) and for selling in the city markets.

In this respect, Mejía said that knowledge in the field is mainly “practical” and that “greater scientific and theoretical knowledge” is required regarding potatoes in order to be able to “innovate” in production.

INTELLIGENT AGRICULTURE

Bolivia has “over 1,500 varieties of native potatoes” and many of them “are able to adapt to climatic variations,” said Santiago Vélez, Bolivia’s representative of the Inter-American Institute for Cooperation on Agriculture (IICA).

Vélez said that rescuing ancestral “values” and “knowledge,” such as respect for lunar cycles, is “crucial” for developing “measures for adapting to climate change,” and part of this involves learning about native Bolivian potato varieties and the combination of “climate-smart” crop techniques.

Mejía said that climate-smart agriculture involves a “set of practices” that link science with ancestral knowledge to establish which species might be suitable for germination in sites with a specific altitude, humidity, temperature and soil characteristics, coupled with the region’s culture.

In this respect, both Mejía and Bautista agreed that organic techniques should be implemented for protection rather than chemical products that damage the soil’s fertility.

For his part, Velez pointed out that “smart” work in potato crops also involves the use of improved seeds, using native seeds with organic production components.