The International Potato Centre in South America has been demonstrating the amazing healing properties of humble potatoes, as Hugh O'Shaughnessydiscovers in Peru
If this place had been in existence in the 1840s, the history of Ireland would have been a great deal different. The International Potato Centre is on the outskirts of Lima, the desert capital of Peru, which lies beside the Pacific Ocean. Inside its front gates some of the lawn has been dug up to give room for a few dozen rows of potatoes.
One row is withered and dying.
"That one has the late blight of the sort which caused the Potato Famine," says Paul Stapleton of the centre nonchalantly. The interest in the patch lies less with the mouldering tubers than in the rows each side of them.
Their foliage is firm and healthy and shows no sign of the disease which resulted in the starvation of so many Irish people and changed Irish society for ever. "These have been bred to be resistant to blight," he adds. It all sounds so simple.
The Centre, or CIP as it is sometimes called after its Spanish acronym, is one of those rarefied organisations which are supported by governments and other bodies from around the globe and which, like the Red Cross, restore the visitor's faith that international relations can on rare occasions be positive and constructive.
Its job is to help in the development of the potato and allied species for the relief of hunger and poverty worldwide. Once physically threatened by bloodthirsty left-wing extremists at the same time in jeopardy of being throttled by lack of money, the CIP has entered happier times.
The Maoist Sendero Luminoso terror group attacked the CIP outstation in the Andes for being in the pay of imperialism, but the locals helped to fight them off. Financially the CIP has recovered from a crisis caused in part by the collapse in the value of the US dollar, a recovery aided by a contribution from the Irish Government.
Unsurprisingly, the staff exude a quiet pride in their survival and in the job they are now carrying out for mankind. They also display a firm faith that the tuber can produce positive results of the sort which few laymen can imagine at the beginning of the 21st century.
The heart of the CIP, its holy of holies, is the building which houses its gene bank. There, under the light, sit rows and rows of test-tubes containing 5,000 types of cultivated potato, which include native Andean potatoes and materials developed through breeding. There are also more than 2,000 of their wild relatives, which correspond to 140 wild species.
It also guards nearly 6,000 samples of the sweet potato and more than 1,600 other roots and tubers from the Andes. The samples the gene bank holds contain the potential to develop new disease-resistant strains or ones which can adapt to most climates they are introduced into.
For food emergencies the CIP keeps a stock of disease-free, transportable potato seeds, enough to produce 8,000 tonnes of potatoes for food and seed within 90 days of delivery. The seeds, which are more transportable, have already saved lives in Rwanda after the end of the genocide, and in Central America as it recovered from hurricanes at home in Peru, and in North Korea.
The CIP helps an institute in north-east China which shares knowledge with the North Koreans and allows the potato to hold up a shield to hunger in the whole region.
THE VISITOR TO Peru cannot but be impressed by the unimaginable varieties of potato which grow in the country. "One of the reasons why so many varieties have subsisted here is that almost every village in the highlands seems to have its own, and because the villagers don't travel very much, the varieties remain unchanged," says Stapleton, a Welshman from Swansea.
There are curved, elongated white ones which seem to have been modelled on the digestive tract of a bullock, ones shaped like a hand grenade, others naturally puckered and sometimes bearing a similarity to an old man's face.
They come not just in the white we expect, but also in orange and black and purple.
The older ones continue to bear the names they were given by the Aymara and Quechua peoples, who inhabited Peru millennia before the Spaniards arrived at the beginning of the 16th century: sakampaya, like an old bone; or puka willka, sacred red one; or puka lluychupa qallun, like a red deer's tongue; or, enigmatically, yana qhachun waqachi, black one that makes the daughter-in-law weep.
The potato, which originated near Lake Titicaca on the frontier between modern Peru and Bolivia, took time to be accepted in Europe. Its botanical relationship with belladonna, which contains a substance called atropine believed to help witches fly, was one barrier.
Marie Antoinette of France would not eat potatoes, but did put potato flowers in her hair.
Scottish clergymen, says the CIP, forbade their flocks to plant potatoes or eat them because they were not mentioned in the Bible. In Britain there was a 19th-century Society for the Prevention of an Unwholesome Diet which damned the potato and whose initials may have been the origin of the word "spud".
Sweet potatoes have proved themselves in Africa. The orange-fleshed tuber has more vitamin A than most other plants and is being grown to counter vitamin A deficiency, which produces blindness or partial blindness in 2.5 million children in Africa and other poor regions of the world.
"Mothers can see that their children like sweet potatoes and that they do them good," says Stapleton.
Other roots and tubers find refuge in the CIP. The maca, for instance, which grows above 4,000 metres in Peru, has been used for centuries to stimulate fertility in humans and livestock, and is now available in capsule form for mental and physical fatigue and impotence. Other crops, such as achira, ahipa and arracacha, are good for thickening babyfoods, while mashua contains insecticide and mauka, oca and ulluco are full of calcium and vitamin C. The yacón is sweet but cannot be absorbed in the gut and can therefore be ingested as a sweetener safely by diabetics who can't take sugar. It also acts as a laxative and can help prevent colon cancer and osteoporosis.
The qualities of these plants merit more investigation. What the CIP does not allow is for a commercial organisation to take out a patent with its help. Any company which seeks its assistance has to sign a contract giving up part of its profit for the centre.
The common potato and the water it has been cooked in have been used to fight scurvy and rheumatism, heal black eyes, treat warts, soothe frostbite and sunburn and relieve toothache, stomach ache and sprains. The Andean peoples also developed their own techniques of conserving the potato by freeze-drying during the icy nights and hot days.
The process also gets rid of the glycol-alkaloids which aid the potato to withstand low temperatures in the High Andes but which can poison humans. The product, chuño, can be kept for years and still be non-poisonous, nutritious and edible.
YET THE MAIN thrust of the CIP's work is on the potato we know and love, and the staff feel that it is only just coming into its own. It is a most adaptable plant, as Charles Darwin noted when he was aboard the HMS Beagle.
"It is remarkable," he wrote, "that the same plant should be found on the sterile mountains of central Chile, where a drop of rain does not fall for more than six months, and within the damp forests of the southern islands."
The CIP staff point out that it is so adaptable it can, if protected, grow on almost any piece of waste ground in a slum. Not only does the centre see any food deficit which might develop in China as likely to be overcome by better cultivation of potatoes rather than better rice, where genetic development has often gone as far as it can go, it also offers help in facing the long-term demands for food that the whole planet's growing population is making. And, as we have seen, it can also come to the rescue in the short term.
"No other crop has greater possibilities," says Stapleton.