Publications /  Annual Report 2001

Cooperation pays: CIP supports China's drive to end hunger and poverty CIP's collaboration with China's potato research programs dates back to the mid-1980s. In the early 1990s, the partners singled out China's south- western provinces as meriting special attention

A rural backwater Media coverage of China's economy tends to focus on the booming cities of the lowlands and the coast where annual growth tops 10 percent. The country's mountainous rural hinterland, where the pace of development is much slower, attracts less attention. This is, however, where China's estimated 60 million poor and hungry live, most of them in the densely populated southwestern provinces of Chongqing, Guizhou, Sichuan and Yunnan. Paradoxically, many of this region's hungriest people are farmers. Typically they are solitary women or older married couples, often belonging to minority cultural groups, who raise crops and livestock on tiny farms of less than 0.25 hectare. They supplement their meager incomes from agriculture with remittances from their husbands or children, who have joined the exodus to the cities in search of labor. Closely associated with rural poverty in China's southwest and therefore central to its eradication is that stalwart of peasant economies, the potato. The crop is grown in three main zones: the plains and valleys, where it is sown in winter to reach nearby urban markets in spring when prices are highest; the steeply sloping low- to mid-hills where it is a mixed subsistence and cash crop, often grown twice a year with sowings in spring and early autumn; and the high plateaus, just below the snows of the peaks, where it is virtually the only crop that can be grown during a brief season in high summer.  Whereas the first two zones have filled up with people, the third is extremely remote and has few inhabitants. In many areas, potatoes are strip-cropped with maize - the region's other important food crop - but monocropping is also practiced.

"Southwest China presents us with a classic challenge," says CIP economist Tom Walker. "In this largely rural region, increasing the production of staple food crops such as potato and maize is the way to drive broad-based economic development in which the poor can participate."

Dangerous dependence

Despite potato's importance to these rural populations, when Walker asked farmers in a remote village in Chongqing Province what they had learned from a farmer field school they had recently attended, he got an unexpected reply: "There is more than one kind of potato." It turned out that until then they had known only one East German variety called Mira, introduced back in the 1950s. Mira had become so prevalent that the farmers thought it constituted the entire species.

It isn't difficult to understand why Mira caught on. With its northern European origins, it had proved well adapted to the variable but harsh conditions of the southwestern mountains. Mira is a trustworthy "rustic" potato of the kind that has fueled peasant economies the world over. It yields well year after year, is a staunch ingredient of soups and stews, tastes good and fills stomachs, especially during long winter months when there isn't much else to eat.

But the farmers' ignorance of other varieties was symptomatic of a dangerous dependence. The narrow genetic base of their potato production placed them at risk of crop failure to pests and diseases. Already, Mira's resistance to late blight - which devastated potato fields under similar conditions in Ireland in the 1840s - was breaking down. The farmers complained that when blight struck, their yields fell drastically to 6-7.5 tons per hectare, compared with 18-22 tons per hectare in a normal year. The quality of their seed tubers had also declined under the continuous onslaught of viruses.

It was clear that increasing biodiversity in the region was crucial to protecting farmers' food security. Over the past decade, Chinese researchers have stepped up their efforts to develop and disseminate a wider range of improved varieties, often using materials supplied by CIP. Those efforts are now paying off.

A wider base

In 1990, CIP sent the seeds of a cross known as S-88 to Wang Jun, a professor at the Root and Tuber Crop Research Institute of Yunnan Normal University, in Kunming. Tested in an experimental plot, S-88 yielded better than all the other selections under evaluation. Its promise was recognized by Ting Fei, a senior plant breeder at the county level, who worked with Wang and other researchers to further evaluate S-88 in Yunnan's government-sponsored provincial trials. In 1995 this work led to the release of a new variety, which the team named Cooperation 88 to reflect the importance of partnership in its development and testing.

As the researchers had expected, Yunnan farmers took to the new variety immediately. By late 2001, less than seven years after its release, Cooperation 88 covered an estimated 20 percent of the area devoted to potato in the province. It had also spilled over into neighboring Sichuan and Chongqing. And its seeds were being traded over China's borders, into Vietnam and Burma.

Cooperation 88 is highly responsive to inputs and delivers a massive yield gain over Mira, producing up to 60 tons per hectare when monocropped. It also has another advantage: with its uniformly large tubers and shallow eyes, it is better for processing. This is an important characteristic in regions emerging from subsistence into market economies, enabling farmers to sell their surpluses not just to local markets but also to a growing number of factories producing chips, starch and other products.

But researchers still feel the need to broaden the genetic base for potato farmers in China. "Cooperation 88 is merely the first in a stream of new materials that will reach farmers' fields," notes Zhang Yongfei, one of the team who worked with Wang and is now a plant breeder himself. He and his colleagues are busy developing the next generation of improved varieties. These will have more stable resistance to late blight disease and will be more suitable for intercropping than Cooperation 88, which tends to compete too aggressively with companion crops and is therefore best monocropped. Other traits receiving attention include resistance to bacterial wilt, as well as early maturity.

Seed dynamos make the difference

The rapid spread of Cooperation 88 owes much to Yunnan's dynamic seed sector. China's southwest enjoys the same advantages for seed production as the Andes in Latin America: strong demand for seed on the plains, where commercial farmers grow the crop for market, coupled with ideal conditions for the production of healthy seed in the mountains, where the cool, dry climate reduces the risk of pests and diseases.

Yunnan has decided to capitalize on these advantages. "The province has the most positive policy environment for the potato seed sector that I have seen in a developing country," says CIP economist Charles Crissman, who visited the region recently to assess the potential for impact. The lead comes from the Provincial Department of Agriculture, which provides financial support for seed program development in designated areas. The department has linked this investment with the introduction of technologies - for tissue culture and virus-free seed production, for instance - to speed up seed multiplication and guarantee its quality. Farmers can obtain small loans from rural banks to buy seed or other inputs, and seed tubers of new varieties are made available at subsidized prices from county agricultural bureaus during the first few years of production.

The seed sector in other provinces is less well organized, according to Crissman. In Sichuan, production sites are widely scattered and there is less formal policy support. Guizhou and Chongqing have generally lower altitudes, offering fewer opportunities for quality seed production. All three provinces, however, can catch up to some extent by following their more progressive neighbor's example.

Even in Yunnan, several constraints still hold back the seed sector, and potato production as a whole. "Many farmers don't yet appreciate the value of good seed," says Zhang. "As a result, they aren't willing to pay a premium for it, putting quality seed producers at a disadvantage." And when farmers do obtain good seed, they are seldom able to get the most out of it. "Except on larger farms near cities, the use of inputs remains low, so there is a large gap between the yields achieved on research stations and those on farmers' fields. For some farmers, potato is still a 'lazy crop' - one for which they just plant the seed then wait for the harvest," Zhang adds.

Impact ahead

Despite these problems, the prospects for achieving substantial impact in the southwest are good, Crissman argues. Coupled with higher yields, expansion in the area cultivated should allow a quantum leap in production over the next few years, with large surpluses meeting growing demands from Hong Kong and the coast, as well as Malaysia, Singapore and other Southeast Asian and Pacific markets. Already, orders are coming in from as far afield as Shanghai.

Progress with potatoes is running in tandem with another regional success story, that of maize. With the support of the Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo CIMMYT), provincial researchers have introduced modern hybrids and improved open-pollinated varieties, contributing to a steady rise in yields to over 3 tons per hectare by the late 1990s, nearly double their level in 1970.

"Together, potato and maize are doing much to pull the region out of poverty and hunger," says Walker. Turning farmers' deficits into surpluses has already increased food security and incomes. It is also triggering growth in other sectors, notably the processing industry and livestock production, both of which are valuable sources of additional cash for farmers. The demand for meat, in particular, is growing rapidly as incomes rise.

China does not intend to rest on its achievements in reducing hunger and poverty since its economic reforms of 1978. The government is determined to finish the job it has started and is channelling the necessary additional resources into the southwest. CIP will continue to support these efforts through research, training and information activities. The high probability of success indicates that, once more, cooperation pays.