SOME INTERESTING ASPECTS OF RECENT AND EXPECTED DEVELOPMENTS IN POTATO BREEDING FOR TPS IN SOUTH AND SOUTH-EAST ASIA AND CHINA

Seed production programmes are a major bottle neck in the production and use of the potato as a food in tropical countries or even in developing temperate countries (Sawyer, 1984). This constraint had been recognized by potato workers in India and China way back in the late forties and early fifties.
Thus the realization that true potato seed (TPS) could effectively fill the gap as propagule for growing commercial crop made Dr.
S. Ramanujam, first Director of the Indian Potato Programme and Dr.
Chang Hung Quin, Chinese Agricultural Research Institute in Inner Mongolia, to start research on TPS in 1949–50 and 1952, respectively.
Although this early research showed the potential of TPS towards significantly increasing potato yields, the India Potato Programme was slow in intensifying research till 1976. However, the Chinese Government decided to begin a largescale TPS production programme in 1972.

The availability of two high yielding, late blight resistant varieties – Kannue (Hungarian) and Schwalbe (German) which produce profuse berries and uniform open pollinated progenies, permitted the use of TPS in Inner – Mongolia.
By 1978, five tons of open pollinated TPS were distributed country-wide, with the major portion going to provinces in the SW mountainous region.
TPS from open pollinated berries from these two varieties were produced by skilled farmers, called cooperators (Li, 1983).

The fresh impetus to the Indian potato programme for TPS research came in 1976, and to other countries of these regions in the late seventies following CIP’s committed support to this technology.

Recent and Future Developments of the Potato in the World

M.D. Upadhya

https://doi.org/10.17660/ActaHortic.1987.213.3