There’s a sweetpotato in Papua New Guinea called ‘gimane’. But the farmers prefer to call it ‘I don’t care’. It’s because it grows so well they don’t have to care about much once they get a vine or tuber in the ground and it’ll grow. No fertilizers, no insecticides … not really much to care about and in 4-5 months you’ll get a decent harvest.

Gimane is one of about 1,000 varieties of sweetpotato in PNG. Traders brought vines or tubers here about 300 years ago and it’s just run amok and has become an incredibly diverse crop. That works out well because pretty much everyone in the country will eat a sweetpotato at least once each day.

I came to the Central Highlands of PNG to look at a Crop Trust-funded project which is conserving that sweetpotato diversity as seeds, which will eventually be sent to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault north of the Arctic Circle in Norway.

That’s a pretty novel idea as sweetpotato usually is propagated vegetatively as vines or tubers and not as seeds. But that gets too expensive for institutes. So the folks in PNG are conserving ‘genes, not genotypes’ and hoping to safeguard that enormous diversity forever.

In the two-day visit I pretty much had sweetpotatoes growing out of my ears. But I didn’t care. I loved meeting the team at PNG’s National Agricultural Research Institute and learned so much about sweetpotatoes.