Impact of Climate Change on Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) Production and Adaptation strategies: A Review

Mulugeta Erkalo

doi:10.7176/jbah/9-9-07

Abstract

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is considered as the high potential food security crop and a major instrument for poverty alleviation in Ethiopia. However, it is most vulnerable to climate change due to its exact climatic requirement for various physiological processes. There are many indicators of environmental stresses including climate change, especially global warming, are severely affecting potato growth and productivity worldwide. The changing climate will affect the potato production adversely due to drought ,salinity,frost,flooding, erratic unseasonal rains ,surface temperature, increase in CO 2 fertilization, but decreases after some extent. Besides, anthropogenic activities such as CO 2 may increase crop yields due to increased CO 2 , CH 4 and CFC’s are contributing to the global warming. Under changing climatic situations crop failures, longer growing season, shortage of yields, reduction in quality, influence the pest and disease occurrences, host-pathogen interactions, distribution, and ecology of insects, there by becoming major setback to potato cultivation. Therefore, adaptation strategies needed such as cropping systems and other inputs, shifting growing areas and planting date, improving water management and breeding new tolerant potato varieties. This paper reviews verified that recent impact of climate change in potato production and adaptation strategies. Keywords: Adaptation strategies, Climate change, Drought, Global warming DOI : 10.7176/JBAH/9-9-07 Publication date :May 31 st 2019

Highlights

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is the most important root and tuber crop worldwide and multifaceted as a staple crop that addresses nutritional security especially for a large number of food-insecure smallholder farmers and pastoralists in the country (Thiele et al, 2010; He et al, 2012 ; Dandena, 2018)
Adaptation strategies have short and long-term changes to human activities that respond to the effects of changes in www.iiste.org climate.These the most feasible and recommended measures to adapt potatoes to climate change could include in particular the choice and change of species and varieties, change planting dates, developing new drought and heat resistant varieties, use cropping systems and other inputs improving crop residues and weed management, more use of water harvesting techniques, better pest and disease control for crops, implementing new or improving existing irrigating systems /reducing water leakage, soil moisture conservation mulching,manure management and agroforestry (Rickards and Howden,2012 ; Singh et al.. ,2013). 2.2.1
SUMMARY AND CONCULSION Potato is the top of most important food crop in terms of human consumption over the worldwide

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is the most important root and tuber crop worldwide and multifaceted as a staple crop that addresses nutritional security especially for a large number of food-insecure smallholder farmers and pastoralists in the country (Thiele et al, 2010; He et al, 2012 ; Dandena , 2018). As indicated by Pehrson et al(2010) and McMichael, (2011) rainfall patterns will change, with www.iiste.org rainfall increasing in some regions and seasons and decreasing in others, in nature potato crop is sensitive to water shortage as cited by due to their shallow rooting system characteristic and grown on soil type having low water holding capacity, since this kind of soil is preferable for the ease of potato tuber harvesting (Wishart et al., 2013). This makes potato crop more susceptible to water stress than a lot of other crop species. To meet the water requirement and reach with high quality and quantity of final potato tuber yield, efficient and effective water management is crucial (Yibrah and Araya, 2015)

Pests and disease

Findings

SUMMARY AND CONCULSION