Sweetpotato—Biotechnology in different guises on a broad range of scales

Abstract

Orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes offer the promise of addressing a serious nutritional deficiency in African diets: chronic Vitamin A deficiency, which can cause blindness in children and many complications in adults. Although the official public health policy in Mozambique emphasizes meeting this deficiency through Vitamin A capsules, a group of scientists, mostly women, is championing the cultivation of orange-fleshed sweetpotatoes as an alternative. Not only do the potatoes address the vitamin deficiency; they provide culturally appropriate starchy nutrition and an opportunity to market any surplus the household produces. Creative applications for the powdered sweetpotato, such as in flour for bread, have been developed. Plant tissue culture can support this movement by providing disease-free planting material, making high-yielding, disease-free cultivars more broadly available. Currently, NGOs are purchasing the plantlets on behalf of poor farmers, but eventually, plant tissue culture could become a complementary business in a growing agriculture-based economy, providing rural livelihoods in one of the world's poorest countries. The distributional consequences of the technology of plant tissue culture thus depend on its place in a network of farmer empowerment and rural development as well as on its technical characteristics.