by People's Daily

        Potato industry has been turned into a vital agro-business in China to effect a remarkable change to the regional economic structure with its present potato grown acreage making up one fourth of the total grown acreage worldwide.

        Farmers around China no longer take potato merely as a favorite dish or food on their table. Instead, potato farmers, particularly those in northwestern and southwestern China, such as Inner Mongolia and Gansu province in the north and northwest, and the provinces of Guizhou and Yunnan in the southwest, all regard it as one of vital agro-businesses with huge business opportunities.

        China's total potato acreage reached approximately 5.33 million hectares in 2008, and the combined acreage under potato in the mid-west provinces and regions constitutes 62.5 percent of the total potato-planted area in the country. And potato has become the primary source of food and income for local farmers in these areas.

        Take poor and backward Dingxi city of Gansu province in northwest China. Local farmers began growing potatoes back in 1996. The city currently reapes a revenue of 17.6 billion yuan from potato industry, accounting for 16.7 percent of its GDP, as well as 26.7 percent of an average annual per-capita income for local farmers and their family members.

        With regard to potato production, high yield depends on new good seed strains. "Once we have a fine variety," noted a potato grower named Zhang in Shangdu country in Gansu province, "the output will go up pretty soon." The seed potato he referred to is "de-virus" seed potato, which is early-ripening and high-yielding and of top quality.

So, both output and quality have much to do with seed potato varieties. If virus inroads into a potato plant or stem tuber, the potato strain would degenerate and diseases multiply with a subsequent loss of output.

        China is reportedly to be the single largest producer of potatoes in the world with a quarter of the total global acreages under potato, and its total output accounts for one fifth of the global total. Its per-unit output, however, is merely 14.4 tons per hectare, much lower than the global average level. This is owed solely to the shortage of de-virus good seed potato strains. Nowadays, the "de-virus" seed potato strain sown area is only about 20 percent of China's total potato acreage, whereas such fine seed potato planted area in some developed nations could reach 90 percent at least, according to the Vegetable and Flower Research Institute affiliated to the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences.

        Nevertheless, it is projected that China's potato starch demand would be as much as 3 million tons by the year 2030, when the country could become a center for potato producing and processing as well as trade in the Asia-Pacific region and world at large.

        … Only with botany – the potato is a tuber, not a "tubular" – but, above all, with the potato's place in agriculture, the economy and world food security. According to the Food & Agricultural Organization of the United Nations in the 2008 "Year of Potato”, the potato is already an integral part of the global food system.