Lima-based CIP to launch grandscheme to tap potato potential

Nizam Ahmed The bright prospects for utilising potato in the reduction of poverty and malnutrition have been on the rise with the gradual increase in the harvest of the crop-food item in the country over the past years, experts said on Sunday. "Potato is a nutritious food consisting of protein, iron, magnesium and zinc, and it can be consumed like any other staple," Prof. Dr. Hosne Ara Tahmin, former additional director general of the health services, told the FE. Meanwhile, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and the Lima-based International Potato Center (CIP) have taken up potato as a major food item in the fight against poverty and malnutrition in the disaster-prone southern Bangladesh. "The harvest of potato has been rising in the past several years, and in the last crop season the production was around 7.5 million tonnes," Habibur Rahman, director general of the department of agricultural extension (DAE), told the FE. Poverty and malnutrition continue to exist side by side in Bangladesh despite the fact that the country is said to have been producing sufficient food grains, mainly rice, to feed its entire population. The rice production was some 34 million tonnes in 2010 and it is expected to be increased by another 1.0 million tonnes by the end of the current calendar year. At present, poverty affects 40 per cent of the country's some 160 million people, while malnutrition forces some 56 per cent of children to stay underweight. The percentage of malnutrition among children under five years of age is the highest in the world, said the USAID. In an effort to combat these blights, the Lima-based International Potato Center is launching a new programme in southern Bangladesh to raise people's income and improve nutritional health converting potato into an effective tool through marketing. "Sweet potato and vegetables will also be used to supplement potato," CIP said in a statement issued on Tuesday. The country produced some 900,000 tonnes of sweet potato and 1.15 million tonnes of vegetables in the fiscal year 2010-11, DAE officials said. However, thousands of tonnes of potatoes are also reported to get rotten every year due to lack of adequate storage facilities. With a new grant of $1.5 million from USAID, CIP will be working in partnership with the Taiwan-based Asian Vegetable Research and Development Center and Bangladeshi organisations to introduce innovations in crop production, marketing, and consumption of potato, sweet potato, and vegetables, the CIP statement said. More specifically, the project's two-pronged approach will promote the commercial production of potato, sweet potato, and vegetables to generate income from the high-value cash crops along with the promotion of homestead gardens, with a focus on subsistence production, nutrition, and crop diversity among low-income agricultural households. Over the next five years, the project hopes to generate positive impacts in terms of greater income and food security for 100,000 families in the southern region of the country. The project will deliver improved, robust, and adapted potato and sweet potato varieties, as well as training in seed system management, supply, technology, and positioning value-added crops in local markets, CIP said. Potato, sweet potato and other vegetables will diversify local cereal-based diets and raise nutrition level and food security. For instance, just a medium-size orange-fleshed sweet potato can help decrease blindness and prevent 60 per cent possible deaths among children under five years of age, who are currently at risk of vitamin-A deficiency.