Potato Farmer - Role in World Food Supply

Role in World Food Supply

Top Potato Producers
in 2011
(million metric tons)
People's Republic of China 88.4
India 42.3
Russia 32.7
Ukraine 24.2
United States 19.4
Germany 11.8
Bangladesh 8.3
Poland 8.2
France 8.0
Belarus 7.7
World Total 374.4

The United Nations FAO reports that the world production of potatoes in 2010 was about 324 million tonnes. Just over two thirds of the global production is eaten directly by humans with the rest being fed to animals or used to produce starch. This means that the annual diet of an average global citizen in the first decade of the 21st century included about 33 kg (or 73 lb) of potato. However, the local importance of potato is extremely variable and rapidly changing. It remains an essential crop in Europe (especially eastern and central Europe), where per capita production is still the highest in the world, but the most rapid expansion over the past few decades has occurred in southern and eastern Asia. China is now the world's largest potato-producing country, and nearly a third of the world's potatoes are harvested in China and India. The geographic shift of potato production has been away from wealthier countries toward lower-income areas of the world, although the degree of this trend is ambiguous.

In 2008, several international organizations highlighted the potato's role in world food production, in the face of developing economic problems. They cited its potential derived from its status as a cheap and plentiful crop that grows in a wide variety of climates and locales. Due to perishability, only about 5% of the world's potato crop is traded internationally; its minimal presence in world financial markets contributed to its stable pricing during the 2007–2008 world food price crisis. Thus, the United Nations officially declared 2008 as the International Year of the Potato, to raise its profile in developing nations, calling the crop a "hidden treasure". This followed the International Rice Year in 2004.

Read more about this topic:  Potato Farmer

Famous quotes containing the words role in, role, world, food and/or supply:

    Friends serve central functions for children that parents do not, and they play a critical role in shaping children’s social skills and their sense of identity. . . . The difference between a child with close friendships and a child who wants to make friends but is unable to can be the difference between a child who is happy and a child who is distressed in one large area of life.
    Zick Rubin (20th century)

    Language makes it possible for a child to incorporate his parents’ verbal prohibitions, to make them part of himself....We don’t speak of a conscience yet in the child who is just acquiring language, but we can see very clearly how language plays an indispensable role in the formation of conscience. In fact, the moral achievement of man, the whole complex of factors that go into the organization of conscience is very largely based upon language.
    Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)

    Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    It is the mark of a mean, vulgar and ignoble spirit to dwell on the thought of food before meal times or worse to dwell on it afterwards, to discuss it and wallow in the remembered pleasures of every mouthful. Those whose minds dwell before dinner on the spit, and after on the dishes, are fit only to be scullions.
    Francis De Sales, Saint (1567–1622)

    Friends and contemporaries should supply only the name and date, and leave it to posterity to write the epitaph.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)