A sack of cleaned potatoes (Photo : http://www.fieldandfeast.com)
China is going the way of western countries by adapting the potatoes as the Asian giant’s staple food within the next four years. The big shift aims to stop land, water and food shortages.
It also targets to ensure basic food supply is available as the country’s population balloons to 1.3 billion by 2020. The shift to potatoes is because the root crop uses 30 percent less water to grow compared to other sources of staple food such as rice, corn and wheat to make noodles.
To make the change feasible, the government doubled the land dedicated to potato crops, reported USA Today. The Ministry of Agriculture plans to further expand potato acreage to 25 million acres, said Freshplaza.
Technicians are also double timing the production of potato plants by cutting the leaves of tiny sprouts and dropping the cuttings into bottles of growth jelly.
Done at a laboratory 50 miles north of the capital city, the method of propagation being done in the Beijing facility – which should result in each snippet sending up a shoot of its own in a few weeks - is the fastest way to produce a lot of healthy potato seeds, said Xisen Potato Group Project Manager Li Huaming. Xisen is the largest potato developer in China.
Developing the potato industry and encouraging Chinese to eat the root crop instead of grains or noodles are vital measures to further develop China’s agriculture sector. In doing so, the country would be able to prevent discontentment which is the result of hunger, according to Chinese Vice Minister of Agriculture Yu Xinrong’s keynote address on summer.
Actually, China is already the world’s biggest grower of potato, but about 50 percent of its annual 95 million tons of production is shipped overseas. This situation explains the big challenge facing Chinese authorities to convince its 1.2 billion residents to abandon rice and go potatoes.
So far, only French fries are the type of potato dish that Chinese eat. Part of the reason behind their dislike for the root crop is it is associated with poverty when China went through a food crisis in the mid-1600s when rice and noodles became a food for the rich and potato was all the impoverish Chinese ate.
