Potato

The potato is the third most important food crop in the world after rice and wheat in terms of human consumption. A single medium-sized potato contains about half the daily adult requirement of vitamin C. Other staples such as rice and wheat have none. The potato is very low in fat, with just 5% of the fat content of wheat, and one-fourth the calories of bread. Boiled, it has more protein than maize, and nearly twice the calcium. But it is not just a food crop, being used in the pharmaceutical, textile, wood and paper industries as an adhesive, binder, texture agent and filler and potato starch is a 100% biodegradable alternative to plastics used in manufacturing disposable plates and cutlery. 

The crop is grown in more than 100 countries around the world, and are a staple food for more than 1 billion people. According to FAOStat, the five largest producers in 2021 were China, India, Ukraine, the United States of America and the Russian Federation. 

The plants can be grown at any altitude and with little water, and a hectare of potato can yield two to four times the food quantity of a grain, making it an ideal mountain crop. 

Challenges 

Potato faces a number of challenges, including the effects of climate change and a range of pests and diseases, particularly late blight and bacterial wilt. Previous work has identified sources of heat and drought tolerance and disease resistance in CWR. However, these are often weedy plants producing small, bitter tubers. Pre-breeding is needed to transfer these traits into the cultivated potato. A further challenge is that the crop is largely produced clonally rather than from true seed, which presents challenges for producing sufficient disease-free planting materials to promote large-scale uptake of new varieties. 

Building on the Crop Wild Relatives Project 

The Crop Wild Relatives Project made considerable strides in pre-breeding potatoes using CWR, culminating in the release of CIP-Matilda, a new potato variety derived from CWR that is almost completely resistant to late blight — a disease that caused an estimated global loss of $6.7 billion in yield losses and control costs and that is spreading into higher altitudes in the Andes. Pre-bred lines developed from crosses with wild relatives have also shown good resistance to late blight and bacterial wilt and tolerance of heat, drought and salinity. 

The project also saw the development of testing of a new breeding approach — diploid hybridization — that facilitates pre-breeding between potato wild relatives and cultivated varieties.