Potatoes… - Bayer CropScience

Potato starch – a
versatile commodity
The potato is the world’s fourth most important
food plant – after rice, wheat and maize.
But that’s not all: the tuber’s starch content
also makes the modest spud an extremely
versatile and sustainable raw material.
French fries, potato pancakes, fried potatoes
– the potato seems to have an endless
number of uses in the kitchen. Following
its discovery in South America by Spanish
colonialists in the 16th century, the potato
plant Solanum tuberosum (from the
Solanaceae family) spread around the
globe. However, the indigenous people of
South America had already recognised the
value of the potato several thousand years
earlier. Today, the potato is the number one
staple food for more than a billion people,
thanks to its excellent nutritional properties –
reason enough for the United Nations to
declare 2008 the “International Year of the
Potato“. But the famous spud can do a lot
more than just feed people. The potato’s
starch content makes it an important sustainable
raw material. It delivers the highest
yield of starch per cultivated hectare (6.5
tonnes - compared with 3 tonnes and 4.5
tonnes for wheat and maize, respectively).
Europe in the lead
According to figures from the Food and
Agricultural Organisation of the United
Nations (FAO), approximately 314 million
tonnes of potatoes were harvested around
the world in 2006. More than two-thirds of
the harvest were used for human sustenance.
The rest was used for industrial
uses, as animal feed, or as seed. There are
no detailed data for the extent to which
potatoes are used for non-nutritional purposes
in the various regions of the world,
but the figures for the nutritional use of
potatoes at least give an indication: the
proportion is considerably higher in Africa,
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