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Science Bulletins: Potato Biodiversity—Ensuring the Future | American Museum of Natural History | YouTubeToText
YouTube Transcript: Science Bulletins: Potato Biodiversity—Ensuring the Future
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here in Peru potatoes have a huge
cultural meaning potatoes are part of
the key diet potatoes are eaten at
dinner we once asked a farmer here and
he said without potatoes there is no
life that's what he kind of summed it [Music]
up the potato has been part of andian
culture for about 10,000 years
they first cultivated the potato around
Lago tiaka which is in the border
between the southern part of Peru and
the northern part of Bolivia so that is
effectively where people started
thinking about changing the evolutionary
path of potatoes into becoming something
nutrients the potato is one of the top
crops for food around the
world and it encompasses a lot of good things
nutritionally it has good protein it has
good starches it also has iron and
calcium and many other things that
people need for their
nutrition and a lot of people's
well but potato biodiversity is under
threat from climate change from
political instability from
challenges so here at the international
potato Center in order to address some
of these challenges we conserve the
biodiversity of the potato and we
preserve the genetic resources in test
tubes of a lot of the different types of
potatoes that are no longer in existence
we conserve three different kinds of [Music]
[Music]
potatoes wild potatoes are what you
found before people cultivated potatoes
so they're very small they're very
bitter but they have a very important
combination of genes that we want to be
able to
conserve when people started cultivating
wild potatoes and picking the best of
the best we arrived at what we Define as
a native potato which is a potato that
people have used through the years maybe
hundreds of
years now with the effect of human
activity in the world there's more rain
in some places there's more heat than was
was
expected and so we bred these native
varieties with wild potatoes that
contained maybe disease resistance or heat
heat
tolerance those are then called improved potatoes
the andies has always been a very
risk-prone environment and that's why we
see so much diversity here because the
diversity is kind of a response to risk
so the purpose of today's visit is to
monitor the diversity of potato that is
maintained by the farmers not in Jean
Mor M what we're doing now withan we're
going to each of his row and each of the
encounter we basically register the
varieties according to the naming thatan gives
gives
us we already have a baseline from 2006
2007 and we aim to compare it [Music]
[Music]
this was incredible I've never seen this one
one
before I've been visiting Don Juan's
farm for for at least few years and this
appeared sometimes new things appear and
we don't really know how to explain how
they appear or why they appear whether
it's mutation or whether it's because of
uh sexual crosses or it's just a very
scarce variety we've never seen it before
before
but that's why it's so important to come
back to these Farms because the evolving
part and the dynamic part takes place in the
fields the number one problem now for
Farmers is climate
change we used to be able to plant
potatoes at 4,000 m above sea
level now because it's hotter the local
farmers have had to move up the mountain
a little bit more than say 20 or 30 or
40 years ago to get that cool
temperature which is the appropriate
potatoes but there's just so much that
you can climb up the hill to be able to
plant potatoes
that's why it's very good if you use the
improved potatoes that are coming out of
the breeding program here at the
Center a lot of the varieties that we
have collected here in the Jean Bank are
very heat tolerant because they were
collected in an area that naturally is
evolve okay yes
okay and so when breeders want to cross
varieties to try to cultivate for heat
tolerance they look for a plant that has
been collected in that type of hot
environment and so you're introducing
heat nowadays in Peru the estimate is
that about one3 of the total potato area
is dedicated to Native potatoes and two
varieties compared to Native potatoes
improved potatoes have higher yields
they have a cheaper price they're more
accessible to Urban
climates so improved potatoes can feed
I think that the secret to climate
adaptation is partly inside of the
biodiversity conservation is dynamic
Farmers adapt they adopt new varieties
some may get lost and other varieties
that are stronger and better adapted to
the new conditions will become more
abandoned what's important is that we
continue to support farmers in their
efforts to maintain potato diversity
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