Carlos Ochoa in his earlier days, searching in the Andes for previously unknown varieties of potato. (Courtesy Carlos Ochoa)

Carlos Ochoa made his name collecting potatoes, mostly in his native Peru. Now in his seventies but looking twenty years younger, he joined the Lima-based Centro Internacional de la Papa (International Potato Center), also known as CIP, in 1971. Before that, he used his inheritance from his father, a landowner, to support his collection, classification, and breeding of Andean potatoes. In addition to his senior position at CIP, he serves as a professor at the National Agrarian University at La Molina, a suburb of Lima.

There is widespread agreement among scientists that potatoes originated in the Andean region, whose cool nights and warm days are ideal for many species of the plant. Potatoes are the most economically important members of the family Solanaceae (others include tobacco, tomato, and chili). World production of potatoes runs behind only wheat, rice, and maize. Increasingly, potatoes are used for processing, as any customer of fast-food restaurants can testify.

Ochoa in his greenhouse at the International Potato Center. (CIP)

The food is an example of a basic commodity that seems destined to prosper in the Southern world, no matter what. Usually, when a region’s income rises and more of its people move to the cities, their tastes change. They may eat more meat in place of the less-expensive grains they once consumed, and they may buy prepared supermarket foods instead of making their own meals from scratch.

These “upwardly mobile families,” as the economists call them, may abandon potatoes in their traditional stews, but they will eat them in the form of McDonald’s french fries and frozen Tater Tots. The tuber made its way to Europe in the latter sixteenth century (Sir Walter Raleigh brought it from America to England), and after a period of hesitant acceptance it became a staple in the North. (To see what happened in Ireland, click here. To go to detailed pictures of potato plants [including the sweet potato, which isn’t related to the white potato at all], click here.)

Usually, the food is grown, or propagated, from tissues that are called “seed potatoes.” New stems grow out of the seed’s “eyes,” and the stems sprout underground, horizontal structures called rhizomes. It is the rhizomes that produce the final fruit. The main stem, meantime, reaches the surface and produces leaves and often beautiful flowers. It is the distinctive leaves and, sometimes, flowers, that the skilled potato germplasm collector searches for. Sometimes they are very tiny.

Carlos Ochoa has discovered more than eighty wild and endangered species of potato in the Andes and environs, or about two for each year in which he has been collecting. This represents almost one-third of the known wild species on Earth. He has completed the first volume, about Bolivia, in a remarkable series named The Potatoes of South America (Cambridge University Press, 1991).

No signs of quitting.
And he shows no signs of quitting. “It would be, I would say, an arrogance to say that there is nothing to be collected any more,” said Ochoa one day not long ago. He was in Washington, D.C., to accept an award from the Organization of American States. “One life is not enough for such a big land,” he continued. Furthermore, even once a species is discovered, classified, and filed away, it must be re-collected later to keep the germplasm collections in what Ochoa calls “a nice living state.” (This will be explained further in the pages on in situ and ex situ storage.)

Carlos Ochoa had been able to use his wit, presence of mind, and humor — and his unassailable reputation — to face down numerous obstacles to collecting potatoes in the Andean hills. These obstacles have included gangs of bandits, thieves, and members of the Sindoro Luminoso (Shining Path) guerrilla movement who controlled those hills for several years.

Some of Ochoa’s experiences do look like the Hollywood version. Once, early in his collecting career, the collector stumbled upon a gang of fellows he describes as “thieves and assassins.” He realized from their comments (“Take him alive!”) that his wit and humor probably wouldn’t count for much. He fired a pistol at them while retreating toward his truck. The bad guys started rolling boulders down the mountain at him, but Ochoa made it to the truck and vamoosed.

On another occasion, he walked into group of Shining Path guerrillas who pointed machine guns at him and demanded his name and business. When Ochoa replied, the guerrillas conferred and allowed him to pass. They would have killed him, they told him, except that their leader’s high school graduating class had been called the “Carlos Ochoa Class” to honor the collector’s work.

A dangerous profession.
Other incidents with the Shining Path followed, and in more recent years Ochoa “diminished my ambitious collections because I thought it was very dangerous to continue doing that.” A close scientific friend was assassinated by guerrillas, and one of his assistants was “almost killed” and declines to go into the field any more.

Still, says Ochoa, the germplasm must somehow be collected, particularly the wild relatives of the modern potato. “In nature, these type of materials, which never have been used by man, are always under the pressure of extinction,” he said. “Because man is the most important extinguisher of things in nature. Some of these species have been extinguished. And, as you know, extinction is forever.” (See the forthcoming AboutBiodiversity pages on and Endangered Species.)

The plants must be found, but when they are, Carlos Ochoa feels pangs of regret. “When I am in the field,” he said, “I feel a little sad to disturb them. Plants are like us; they are living organisms. Sometimes we don't have the right to disturb their lives. If you find some material that you are looking for, you have not to gather all that you are looking for. I always — I always — leave some part of the population in the same place, in the same situation that they were living in before.”

Ochoa spends less time in the mountains now, but that is because he is looking for plants at the lower elevations, as well as pushing for wider use of little-known crops. A few years ago, he participated in a gathering in Thailand of people from around the world who were searching for ways to reduce hunger and improve health, and he told the group of promising new foods from the Andes. Llacon (also known as “yacon”) is a root that grows in the valleys. It has a high inulin content. Inulin is useful in the treatment of diabetes.

Maca is a tuber that grows in poor quality soils at high altitudes; Ochoa believes there may be no more than eighty hectares of it in existence. Nazca, which grows in southern Peru where the ancient Nazca culture thrived (and where unexplained networks of lines and figures can be seen from the air, carved into the earth), is a root which is almost extinct. And tomatoes. Ochoa has collected wild tomatoes for years; he helped Charles Rick assemble his famous collection.

Carlos Ochoa has received much recognition. There have been several awards before and after the one he got in Washington, and he was welcomed at the Thailand conference as the living legend he is. Several potato varieties have been named after him, including Solanum ochoanum in Russia, a cultivated variety named ochoa from the University of Michigan, and S. cochoanum at the University of Connecticut. But the greatest kick comes back home in Peru.

“By profession,” he said, “I am a potato breeder. I have produced for my country more than one thousand new varieties of potato for eating. And it is a pleasure for me, it is a big satisfaction, to enter into a market and to see the potatoes that I have found. It is really something which cannot be compensated for with anything. But you feel happy.”

Click the following links to learn about collecting of tomatoes, pigeonpeas, and a maize that was once thought to be extinct. Or return to the previous page about explorers.

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