Tag: Sweetpotato
-
SWEETPOTATOES A LA SINGIDA
When I heard that my colleague Scott Christiansen and I were assigned to look at the value chain of sweetpotatoes in Tanzania I assumed we’d be looking at the same orange, white, or purple tubers that make their way into our meals in a hundred different forms. But in Tanzania, especially in the Singida region, the story doesn’t start or end underground. People eat the leaves. These aren’t the same varieties grown for tubers. These are specially bred for foliage—nutrient-rich, fast-growing, and central to household cooking. I saw the sweetpotato story…
-
THE ROADSIDE MARKET IN PNG
If you want a good sweetpotato in Papua New Guinea you don’t need to go to a supermarket. Just pull over on the road … on almost any road (but there are not too many roads in this super rugged country). My hosts from the National Agricultural Research Institute and I drove past a market near Goroka in the Central Highlands and pulled over in front of a huge display of different varieties of sweetpotato. I didn’t want to buy sweetpotatoes any but wanted to document the diversity. As I jumped…
-
I DON’T CARE SWEETPOTATOES
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…
If you see this after your page is loaded completely, leafletJS files are missing.