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February 20, 2024 | Articles

Hotspots

Potato and its derivatives increasingly become globally traded products. When I visit Chile and ask at a restaurant when eating French fries where they come from, they usually are from Belgian and Netherlands companies. Once in a German restaurant, of course, they came from Germany. The frozen French fries industry in Chile is insignificant and…

February 19, 2024 | Articles

Subsahara

Potato is booming in Africa. Recently the ninth triennial meeting of the African Potato Association took place at Naivasha, Kenya. The meeting was attended by some 350 potato and sweet potato researchers and representatives of the industry from all over Africa. I was present at the launching of the organization in September 1985 and have…

January 31, 2024 | Articles

Entrepreneurship

Potato in Mozambique is an important commodity adding substantially to food security and economics of the Zambezi Valley region. I recently visited the country to find out how the crop can further contribute to food security of the country and to farmers and traders income. Of the 10,000 ha of national potato area yielding about…

January 31, 2024 | Articles

Potatoless

Recently I was interviewed by science journalist Anne Loyen for an article that appeared in the well known – in the Netherlands that is – popular scientific journal Kijk (View). It is entitled: “What if we did not have the potato”. Here I make use of that article.

January 29, 2024 | Articles

Rhizoctonia

In December last year – among other countries – Wageningen colleagues and I visited India and were confronted with – for me that is – almost unprecedented occurrence of black scurf causing considerable damage to potato crops. In Punjab the seed potato state in North-Western India we were shown fields with foliar symptoms as shown…

January 25, 2024 | Articles

Conferences

To find out what is new in potato research attending the 19th triennial conference of the European Association of Potato Research (EAPR) in Brussels and the 98th annual meeting of Potato Association of America (PAA) in Spokane both in July this year is most helpful.

January 24, 2024 | Articles

Enigma

Myanmar, Mozambique and Burundi: just three examples of countries where potato plays a slowly increasing role to feed the population. India, Rwanda and Kenya, just three examples where the potato plays a substantial role in feeding the needy millions.

December 16, 2015 | Articles

Future

When the Spanish conquerors reached the Andes early in the sixteenth century the Incas grew potatoes for many thousands of years. No one then could have imagined that three hundred years later the crop would have become the most important food crop in northern Europe. Even less that a single disease, late blight would have…

September 16, 2015 | Articles

Brownrot

Recently I needed to calculate the losses in global potato production due to late blight caused by the oomycete Phytophthora infestans. I reviewed many articles that reported estimates of losses due to this disease in crops e.g. between 6 and 40 % in Romania, 23 % in Poland, up to 40 % in Burundi, 38-65…

June 17, 2015 | Articles

Micros

A caterpillar becomes a butterfly. Once people did not even know it was about the same individual. These are only two appearances of the butterfly. A butterfly also lays eggs that when hatched deliver the caterpillars that replaces its skin a few times to allow it to grow. Towards winter they weave a web –…

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