Farmers honor man who unpeeled the potato famine mystery

January 6, 1997
Web posted at: 11:45 p.m. EST

From Correspondent Jack Hamann

TUCSON, Arizona (CNN) -- Scientists looking for ways of battling the newest strain of potato blight are gathering in Tucson this week, the home of the man who solved the mystery of the Irish potato famine of the 1840s.

In 1947, John Niederhauser was a bright young scholar hired by the Rockefeller Foundation to help Mexican farmers improve their crops of corn, wheat and beans. But he noticed something he considered unusual on the farms he visited.

"I looked around, and there the corn was, and the other crops, and I asked them, 'why don't you grow any potatoes?'" he recalls. "The farmers, they looked at me kind of puzzled and said, 'it's because the potato won't grow here.'"

Niederhauser had unwittingly stumbled across a mystery which had haunted scientists for decades.

Ireland in the 1840s: more than a million people died, and almost 2 million more were forced to emigrate, when a mysterious blight killed almost all of Ireland's potatoes.

A century later, while helping those Mexican farmers, Niederhauser discovered the same fungus among wild potatoes in Mexico. Just as Irish potatoes had originally come from Latin America, he reasoned, so, too, had blight.

But Niederhauser realized something else -- the wild potato plants in the Toluca Valley of Mexico had somehow developed a resistance to the fungus. The wild potatoes had evolved over thousands of years, Niederhauser says, and in the end "it was no contest. (145K/12 sec. AIFF or WAV sound)

Niederhauser spent many years figuring a way to breed edible potatoes with their wild cousins and produce blight-resistant species that could be grown throughout the world. The result was a remarkably nutritious food source brought to some of the poorest farmers on earth.

Officially retired for several years, John Niederhauser still travels the world to consult with farmers who remain grateful for his innovation.

Some farms in Mexico have plaques erected in his honor. And on his 80th birthday, sacks of mail -- potato sacks -- brought greetings from well-wishers on six continents.

It might have been seven, if potatoes could grow in Antarctica.

 

Related sites:

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• Idaho Potato Expo
• The Potato Growers of Alberta
• World Geography of the Potato

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