Cabudare Kids

Lara's potatoes

Lara's fields, the seeds that went missing and the people who keep planting. A true story from Lara.

Hi! I'm Cardi. This is Daniel, who lives in Sanare, in the Andrés Eloy Blanco municipality of Lara.
His family grows potatoes in the mountains. Potatoes are one of the most important vegetables in Lara.
A potato doesn't grow from a tiny seed. You plant a potato, called a "seed potato", and a new plant grows from it.
If the same potatoes are planted again and again, they pick up diseases. Each time they give less.
That's why Lara's farmers bought good-quality seed potatoes from Canada.
In 2015, each ton of that seed cost 1,200 dollars.
To buy from another country, you need dollars. In 2016, the government allowed seed imports but, according to the farmers, said it had no money.
That year, Lara's farmers got only 3 out of every 10 seeds they needed.
Before, Lara harvested potatoes all year round. Without seed, that ended.
With fewer potatoes at the market, farmers feared the price would shoot up.
Some kept planting with seed taken from their own harvests. But, year after year, the potatoes came out smaller.
In 2020 there was also no gasoline for the tractors. In Sanare, Daniel's town, farmers went back to plowing with oxen.
One farmer put it like this: "We do this because we don't know how to do anything else."
Farmers also looked for ways out. Back in 2015 they planted national seed in Lara, the offspring of the Canadian seed.
They planned to save part of that harvest to plant again without depending on other countries.
In 2010, in Duaca (Crespo municipality), scientists tested new potatoes, more resistant to a disease called late blight.
They were from a university in Barquisimeto. Some of those potatoes did well there.
Daniel helps his family plant. As long as someone keeps planting, Lara will have potatoes.
What did you learn?
- To harvest healthy potatoes you need healthy seed potatoes, and sometimes they come from far away.
- If there's no money to buy what comes from abroad, less gets planted and there's less food.
- Keeping healthy seed, renewing it with good seed and testing hardier potatoes helps grow better harvests.
This really happened
This is where we checked every fact in the story:
1. 1.Bioagro, vol. 22, no. 1 (M. Ojeda et al., UCLA), Evaluación hortícola, producción y calidad postcosecha de clones avanzados de papa en la localidad de Duaca, estado Lara, Venezuela, April 2010.
2. 2.International Potato Center (S. Thomas-Sharma et al., Plant Pathology), Seed degeneration in potato: the need for an integrated seed health strategy to mitigate the problem in developing countries, 2016.
3. 3.FreshPlaza (citing Noticia al Día), Venezuela: Potato crop will plummet due to a lack of seeds, October 9, 2015.
4. 4.Potato Business, Government in Venezuela Authorizes Import of Potato Seeds, July 20, 2016.
5. 5.PotatoPro (citing Correo del Orinoco), Las semillas criollas garantizan producción de papas en Venezuela, November 21, 2015.
6. 6.El Impulso (Pacífico Sánchez), Productores de Sanare están arando con bueyes y no con tractores, July 3, 2020.
For grown-ups: notes and links to sources
For grown-ups: Daniel is made up; the facts are not. The 30% figure for seed received was given in July 2016 by the president of Lara's potato growers' association (Potato Business). The price of $1,200 per ton of Canadian seed was given in 2015 by the potato and vegetable growers' federation (FreshPlaza, citing Noticia al Día). In 2020, according to El Impulso, a kilo of seed cost one dollar and farm supplies had to be paid in dollars. The Duaca trial, in the Crespo municipality, was run by researchers at UCLA, a university in Barquisimeto (Bioagro, 2010). Seed reused for years gets sick and gives smaller potatoes (International Potato Center, 2016; El Impulso, 2020). Sanare, where Daniel lives, is in the Andrés Eloy Blanco municipality.

The story

What did you learn?

This really happened