Warsaw, Polant
June 13, 2001
Russia is teetering on the brink
of a large-scale potato crisis ignited by the same virulent,
fungal-like pathogen, Phytophthora infestans, more commonly
called late blight, that was responsible for the 19th century
Irish potato famine.
But there is hope in the form of a blight-resistant potato
variety, New York 121, which Cornell University scientists have
provided to Russia for testing in the hopes of preventing food
shortages.
Currently, Cornell's CEEM program is the only non-Russian group
actively trying to resolve the Russian potato problems.
Annually, Russia loses 4 million tons of potato, more than 10
percent of total production, due to late blight. Virulent
strains of the pathogen are now spreading to important
potato--producing areas in Russia and to Central and Eastern
Europe.
The late blight threat is still very important and even critical
in some regions, said Alexei V. Filippov, of the All Russian
Institute of Phytopathology, addressing a group of 58
international
agricultural researchers from 12 countries at the Collaborative
Research on Potato Late Blight workshop in Poland last week. The
workshop was co-hosted by the Cornell-Eastern Europe-Mexico
(CEEM) International Collaborative Program on Potato Late Blight
Control and the U.S. Department of Agriculture-Foreign
Agriculture Service (USDA-FAS). "In Central and Eastern Europe,
late blight is a very serious disease, often causing
considerable losses in the field and
storage," said Filippov.
Potatoes account for more than 3.2 million hectares (about 7
million acres) of Russian farmland. Russia is the world's second
largest producer of potatoes, behind China, holding about 7
percent of the global market. Domestically, it is the number two
crop behind wheat and it is considered Russia's "second bread."
To see if the Cornell-bred New York 121 potato, as well as other
varieties of blight-resistant potatoes, can withstand the rigors
of small Russian farms, Patrick Russo, a CEEM technical adviser
who is a researcher at the University of Helsinki, Finland, and
Russian scientists, have made plans to test these new potato
cultivars in St. Petersburg and Moscow. This testing will
prepare the seed for Russian registration and distribution.
Registration would allow the seed to be sold as "certified" to
the millions of small "kitchen gardeners" in Russia who depend
on their own production of potatoes on plots of less than
one-third of an acre.
The scientists meeting in Warsaw said that New York 121 is not a
silver bullet to solve all of Russia's agricultural woes, but is
a small, early step toward sustainability and modernization of a
system that has long been at the mercy of pestilence. In other
studies, additional potato varieties developed for resistance to
late blight in Eastern Europe are being tested in actual kitchen
garden locations and in experiments conducted by Filippov and
William E. Fry, a plant pathologist and senior associate dean at
Cornell's New York State College of Agriculture and Life
Sciences. They will examine the spread of aggressive strains of
late blight now being monitored in different potato-producing
areas of Russia. By tracking the spread of the diverse forms of
this pathogen, potato scientists will be able to better deploy
resistant potato varieties developed at Cornell and elsewhere.
In many regions of Russia, more than 90 percent of agricultural
acreage is worked by small kitchen-garden growers who cannot
afford certified blight-clean seed, which is more expensive than
noncertified seed. Nor can they afford pesticides to ward off
late blight or other pests that afflict potatoes. For
government-run and commercial farms, the cost of pesticides to
combat late blight can be as much as three or four times the
cost to Western farmers. That is because the pesticides are made
by agro-chemical companies in the West, and Russia must buy them
with a weak ruble.
For more than a decade, the St. Petersburg area has been widely
infected with potato late blight, said Russo, and Ewa
Zimnoch-Guzowska, director of potato research at the Mlochow
Potato Research Center near Warsaw. Small land holders in St.
Petersburg, with a population pushing 6 million people, tend
their subsistence gardens on the weekends outside the city.
Russo said the plots are truly organic and once the blight ruins
the crop (which has happened in eight of the last 10 years),
their annual supply of potatoes for their families is greatly
reduced.
Russo explained that much of the potato seed used in Russia is
of inferior quality and is not late-blight resistant. In
addition, the moist climate of northern and central Russia --
where the humidity
can average 75 percent in June, July and August -- is very
favorable to late blight.
To compound Russia's problem, the N. I. Vavilov Institute's
potato germplasm bank in Pushkin has fallen into disrepair
because of funding cuts. Potato seed and tubers are now infected
with viruses
and pathogens and must be sent to the Polish Mlochow facility to
be restored. To alleviate this problem, specific training
programs on virus detection and clean-up procedures for
producing clean potato seed have been started by CEEM in the St.
Petersburg region.
This center also has been provided with computers and Internet
access to be in global contact with researchers. Researchers at
Vavilov research center are now able for the first time to gain
access to current developments on late blight control.
Potato cultivar New York 121 is a small white potato able to
fend off late blight as well as other pests such as golden
nematodes, scab and potato virus Y (PVY). "This is another in a
short line of
potatoes resistant to late blight," said Robert Plaisted,
Cornell professor emeritus of plant breeding who created the
variety, speaking on the potato's introduction last year in New
York.
"Resistance to late blight is one of the hardest things to breed
for in potatoes," he said. New York 121's resistance to the
golden nematode, late blight, scab and PVY is a rare
combination, he noted.
Development of New York 121 dates back more than 30 years when
Plaisted acquired seeds of potato varieties grown in the Andes
mountains of South America. Repeated selection for adaptation to
the New York region -- a region climatically similar to the
northern and central parts of Russia -- and for disease
resistance produced the selection E74-7, the mother of New York
121. This selection was important because of its extreme
resistance to potato mosaic viruses.
In 1984, Plaisted obtained seeds from the International Potato
Center in Peru that had resistance to multiple races of the
golden nematode, a soil-borne pest. One generation of breeding
produced N43-288, the male parent of New York 121. This parent
is mostly of Peruvian ancestry, but includes a wild species from
Argentina.
Ten years ago, Plaisted dusted the female's (E74-7) pistil with
the male's (N43-288) pollen and bred a potato with multiple
resistances. Typically it takes 14 years to bring a newly tested
and developed potato to market, but New York 121 took less than
a decade. In addition to its ability to resist late blight, scab
and certain nematodes, it is a mid-season potato that will be
good for boiling, perhaps even baking -- seemingly ideal for
Russian subsistence farmers.
The conference participants endorsed the idea of implementing a
collaborative project involving CEEM, USDA-FAS and local
institutions in Central and Eastern Europe to conduct on-farm
integrated late blight disease management trials with emphasis
on testing and making promising blight resistant potato
varieties available in the region. A synopsis and strategy paper
for promoting this work has been developed and will form the
basis for future research.
The web version of this release may be found at
http://www.news.cornell.edu/releases/June01/PolandRussia.bpf.html
Cornell University News Service
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Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
607-255-4206
cunews@cornell.edu
http://www.news.cornell.edu
Cornell University news release
N3584 |