| Local Farmers Join Hands with CIP to Conserve Native Potato Varieties
CIP's Director General, Hubert Zandstra (center) and Alejandro Argumedo (left), Director of the Association for Nature and the Sustainable Development (ANDES), the group that has assumed the representation of the six rural Communities that form the Potato Park.
In a landmark development, local farming communities in Peru signed an agreement with CIP to protect the genetic diversity of the region's many potato varieties and the rights of the indigenous people to control access to these local genetic resources.
Under the scheme, CIP scientists and local farmers are working together to establish domesticated varieties and wild potato relatives from CIP's germplasm collection in a ' Potato Park,’ located in Pisac, in the Sacred Valley of the Incas, in Cuzco. Six rural communities live in the park which is spread over 12,000 hectares between 3400 and 4500 meters above sea level. Administered by the local people themselves, the park also provides food for the communities. The initiative is an example of local conservation and sustainable use of the agrobiodiversity at its best.
Farmers in Peru cultivate more than 2000 varieties of native potatoes, most of which are not sold commercially. They are the result of a process of natural selection and of arduous domestication with ancestral technologies that date back to pre-Inca times. That local knowledge is precisely what the framework of the agreement is intended to protect, by keeping the control of genetic resources with the local people.
"Biological diversity is best rooted in its natural environment and managed by indigenous peoples who know it best," says Alejandro Argumedo, associate director of the Association for Nature and Sustainable Development (ANDES), the group that has assumed the representation of the six rural communities that form the Potato Park. He believes that the agreement could serve as a model for other indigenous communities.
The initiative has been widely reported in international media. For example, New Scientist wrote, “Deals like this one prevent multinational seed companies patenting traditional varieties of crops to exploit their native genes. This practice has sometimes forced communities to pay fees for growing seeds they originally bred.” The Inter Press Service News Agency noted that several policy analysts and civil society campaigners are pushing for similar initiatives at meetings of the Convention on Biological Diversity and World Intellectual Property Organisation.
The agreement serves as a prime example of practical applications that support the Biological Diversity convention and FAO’s International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture.
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