Recently an article in the FE (05 Feb 2014) about bumper potato harvest in Bangladesh described the plight of the poor farmers due to the plentiful yield. The bumper harvest has pushed down the prices so low that the poor farmers now can't get even their investment back. Some of the produce of their hard work are left in the fields and getting rotten. Many will be financially ruined and bankrupt. That is very sad.
Potato is the staple food in many countries of the world. Potato contains potassium, calcium, sodium, copper, manganese, phosphorus, iron, pantothenic acid and vitamins A, B and C. It has no saturated, polyunsaturated or monounsaturated fat. Potato has no cholesterol and contains 8.0 per cent dietary fibre. However, potato contains more sugar than rice and thus, diabetes may prefer rice to potato for this reason.
For a normal healthy person, potato is a tasty staple food item. The government should encourage our farmers to grow more potato. It can buy their produce directly from them and use it for consumption as a substitute for rice.
Farmers' associations buy farm goods in many developed countries and in such cases, price for a produce is fixed by calculating carefully cost of investment, working hours spent by a farmer for the produce and a reasonable profit.
Bangladesh is not self-sufficient in food; we have no proper food security. We eat mostly rice three times a day (over 60 per cent of our population) and plenty of it. Bangladesh is the fourth largest producer of rice in the world and this writer assumes that per capita consumption of rice in Bangladesh must be the highest in the world. We eat too much rice, four times more rice per meal that a normal European fellow consumes. Sadly, we do not even consider that there are many other things in Bangladesh that we can eat as substitute to rice and remain very healthy.
Potato is a great product and it can help to some extent in solving our food scarcity. From nutrient point of view it is much richer than rice. Some say, potato is the best of all staple diets. But again, we must not forget that bringing change in food habit is not easy.
So, the question comes, who is going to consume potato instead of rice? Let us remember we didn't use wheat even in the 1980s. Now it is popular with a large section of our population. Once people know how good potato is, it will be very popular with the consumers. Our defence forces can be pioneer in this regard. They can make it their supper to start with.
The bumper potato harvest is a nature's blessings for the nation. Let us be rational and let us not waste this most valuable foodstuff due to our ignorance and prejudice. The elites and the bureaucracy can make a lot of a difference by adopting potato in their menu. Let them eat potato for supper every day and let them use potato in their parties at all times. This scribe suggests a simple menu as follows to begin with:
Boiled or fried potato (instead of rice) with:
(a) Kebab, mutton or beef curry (or beefsteak if you can afford) + sauce + salad,
(b). Chicken curry (or roasted chicken) + sauce + salad or
(c). Fish (boiled or fried) + sauce + salad
In Sweden, people use two different types of sauces for meat and fish items with potato as the staple food. It is very tasty and sumptuous. This writer would be pleased to send some recipes to anybody interested to eat potato as a staple food.
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