High In Andes, Potato Farmers Face Climate Breakdown, Spectre Of Blight - NPR

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In remote farms in the Andes Mountains, elevated thousands of feet above sea level, climate change is threatening a crop that is part of the region's identity: the potato. Farmers here say warmer temperatures are opening the door to the disease that caused the Irish potato famine. And unusual cold snaps during the growing season are also causing problems. The disease could be particularly devastating to Peru, because in these villages the potato is more than just a food — it's a culture.

Vicente Hermogenes Baca Huaman is one of Peru's indigenous potato farmers. A wiry man, he is hoeing a potato field by hand. With his fierce lined face and hooked nose, he is resplendent in a traditional fringed cape, stripes and triangles woven in brilliant colors. His ancestors have hoed this land, just this way, for thousands of years.

He tells us potatoes aren't growing as well as they used to in his sloping field nestled just below green mountain peaks. His land is part of a potato park — a preserve, set up by a non-governmental organization called Association Andes. The association is helping six neighboring villages hold on to the old ways.

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Now local farmer Baca Huaman is working on an experimental plot — he's growing dozens of different kinds of potatoes to find the ones that can tolerate the change in weather. A mountain peak spiked with fir trees rises behind his field. His face softens as he turns to look at it. "When I was a boy, I used to go with my father to the mountain and it would be covered in snow. We would see snow all over these fields," Baca Huaman explains in his native tongue, Quechua. "But there is never snow here anymore." In the past 40 years, Peru has lost nearly a quarter of the glaciers in the Andes to rising temperatures. No one has quantified the precise climate changes in this little village, but Baca Huaman knows. The weather used to be so regular that he knew just when to plant each variety of potato. Now he says nothing is predictable. It's warmer, yet there are early freezes, and the rains don't come when they should.

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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=87811933

[kestrel91316]

1. Be afraid. Be VERY afraid.......

".......The weather used to be so regular that he knew just when to plant each variety of potato. Now he says nothing is predictable. It's warmer, yet there are early freezes, and the rains don't come when they should......" - this is a recipe for eventual MASSIVE famine when everywhere in the world is affected.

[Warpy]

2. The Andean farmers are a little better prepared than the Irish were

The Irish grew a potato commonly known as the Irish cobbler and no other variety. They still grow a dozen or more varieties in the Andes, all of them hardy in one condition or another.

The Irish cobbler potatoes were all susceptible to the same variety of blight. Had their crops been more varied, they wouldn't have been completely wiped out. Unfortunately for them, that's the only variety, the white baking potato, that had been imported.

Monoculture of any type is very risky.