Speech at an Exhibition by Charles and Liz Handy on Potato Farming in Africa
Dublin Airport, 21st April 2015
Minister,[1]
Ambassador,
TDs,
Distinguished guests,
Tá an-áthas orm a bheith anseo libh tráthnóna chun an taispeántas seo a oscailt, taispeántas a thugann aitheantas don ról tábhachtach atá ag an phráta i gcothú slí bheatha do mhórán chlanna feirmeoireachta ar fud na hAifrice.
I am very pleased to join you all this afternoon in Dublin Airport. May I thank John Weakliam and his team at Vita for organising this public exhibition which highlights for all those passing through Dublin Airport the great possibilities afforded by a modest tuber – the potato – in rooting out food insecurity and sustaining thriving farming communities throughout Sub-Saharan Africa.
It is a particular pleasure to be here in the company of Elizabeth and Charles Handy, from whom Sabina and I first heard of this exhibition project when we met in Addis Ababa, in November of last year. May I thank you both, Liz and Charles, for conveying to us, in simple images and words, the rich tapestry of the lives of potato farmers in Ethiopia and Malawi.
As President of Ireland, I also wish to thank and congratulate all of you here from the Irish Potato Federation, Teagasc, Irish Aid and the European Commission Representation in Ireland, who are investing of your skills, knowledge and funds in the “Irish Potato Coalition”. Aimed as it is at developing viable potato industries in six countries across Eastern and Southern Africa, and thus at supporting in a very practical and productive way farming families as they work to enhance their livelihoods, this Coalition is a remarkable example of an ambitious collaborative venture in the service of the global common good. Respect for the food of one’s own place, a commitment to its variety, and the freedom to enjoy an appropriate diet are important rights.
To me, it is only fitting that an Irish-led agricultural development project should focus on the potato, a crop that occupies such an essential place in Ireland’s socio-economic, cultural and nutritional history. Of course, when reflecting on this relationship between the Irish and the potato, the Great Hunger – An Gorta Mór – springs to mind. However, the story of the potato in Ireland is a much wider one; it is, over the long-term, primarily a story of success and abundant yield, rather than failure and starvation.
Indeed the potato is, as you know, a nutritious, vitamin-rich and hardy tuber that lends itself to cultivation on small plots of less fertile soil. It is a crop that suited the needs of Irish rural families, who, after the conquest, were dispossessed and forced to subsist on very limited areas of land, much of the Irish countryside having been converted into grazing land for cattle destined to satisfy the British taste for beef. Thus, over the centuries following its introduction to Ireland, allegedly in the year 1589, the potato gradually established itself as a staple food, particularly for poorer households, and this well into the 20th century.
In the first decades of that century, Ireland also started building up a strong seed potato industry. As a response to the dramatic human consequences entailed by any failure of the potato crop in the so-called “congested districts”, the Board of Agriculture introduced, in 1904, a once-off subsidy towards the purchase of selected seed potatoes. In 1918, it established a Seed Potato Certification Scheme, the first such scheme in Europe, relying on field inspections to verify the varietal purity of growing crops and weed out diseased plants.
Throughout the following decades, it became customary for many small and part-time farmers, especially on the Western seaboard, to grow a few acres of seed potatoes as part of a traditional mixed farming enterprise.
For those farmers, the potato provided a much-needed cash crop, and there blossomed a cottage industry in which all the family members played a role in harvesting and preparing the crop for the market. These are the roots of the thriving potato industry we enjoy today in Ireland, and some of whose main actors are represented here this afternoon.
To see the wealth of expertise accumulated over the years by our potato growers, traders and agricultural services being shared through development projects in other parts of the world is a most welcome development. The Irish Potato Coalition is a great example of a sophisticated collaborative model that brings together responsible scientific research aimed at sustainability, agribusiness and international development practitioners, for the benefit of potato farmers across six African countries, and in close cooperation with local agricultural support services.
It is a model that has already achieved good results, on a smaller scale, in the Chencha region of Southern Ethiopia, where Vita and their local partners have successfully developed a “Potato Centre of Excellence”.
It is a model to which each actor brings their own valuable expertise: the scientific research element, for example, is particularly relevant to the production side – ensuring that good seeds, suited to their environment, are made available to farmers in a way that does not create dependency in the future, and that adequate growing and storage practices are employed. The agribusiness skills are relevant to the market side of things, the overall aim being the creation of self-sustained potato industries (rather than short-term “assistance”). The NGOs’ contribution is at the community level, working together with government support services and with “seed farmers” to ensure that seeds are properly disseminated locally, primarily through farmers’ cooperatives. Indeed it is essential that farmers everywhere be enabled to keep their own seeds, thus preserving their capacity for continuous production.
Most importantly, it is a model that has the ability to make a contribution to tackling two of the most pressing, and interrelated, global challenges of our times, namely responding to climate change and eliminating food insecurity.
As regards the first challenge, the potato is, as I have already said, an extremely hardy crop capable of producing generous yields under a wider range of climatic conditions. Moreover, due to its bulk and high seeding requirements, it does not lend itself to international trade as easily as some other food commodities: like many other staple root crops, potatoes are generally traded locally, and are less vulnerable than, for example, cereals, to global financial speculation trends that are rendered even more acute by the increased pressure on food supplies generated by climate change.
As to food security – the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organisation (the FAO) has long recognised the need to reinvigorate the agricultural and scientific development of potatoes and other beneficial indigenous root crops in the world’s poorer regions. Despite being the fourth most important food in the world, the potato has not, thus far, featured enough in the global debate on food security. I am confident that the Irish Potato Coalition, and this exhibition, can contribute to raising awareness on the great asset that the potato is in the fight against global hunger.
Of course, there are many other equally remarkable initiatives underway in Africa, such as, for example, Ireland’s collaboration with the International Potato Centre (CIP)[2] to introduce improved varieties of both the Irish Potato and the Orange Fleshed Sweet Potato – a collaboration to which I referred on my visit to the University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, in Lilongwe, last November.[3]
During my visit to Ethiopia and Malawi, I witnessed at first-hand the fundamental importance of small farming to the livelihoods of communities, and the significant and varied support provided by Irish development NGOs and Irish missionaries to those communities. May I, then, avail of today’s occasion to acknowledge and commend, once again, the good work carried out by all those organisations, orders, and individuals.
To conclude, may I say how pleased I am that we have this opportunity to celebrate together the place of the potato crop in the fabric of rural communities, here in Ireland, and in Africa. This relationship has been portrayed by artists and writers down the years, and for me Liz Handy’s photographs conjure up other images, such as those crafted by Brian Friel in his evocative short story “The Potato Gatherers”[4].
Although in a very different climate, under a sun which “held its position in the sky and flooded the countryside with light but ... could not warm it”, the two boys in Friel’s story work with the same ardour as those portrayed in this exhibition – “they no longer straightened up; the world was their feet, and the hard clay, and the potatoes, and their hands, and the buckets, and the sacks” –, and Joe’s vision of the wondrous thing he is going to get if his mother gives him anything back – “red silk socks” – echoes the hopes and sense of achievement that shine through the radiant smiles of the women, men and children captured in Liz’s pictures.
I wish you all the very best in your future endeavours in solidarity with the people of Africa. Go raibh míle maith agaibh go léir.
[1] Seán Sherlock, Minister of State with special responsibility for Development, Trade Promotion and North-South Cooperation.
[2] Centro Internacional de la Papa (CIP), based in Lima, Peru: http://cipotato.org
[3] The orange-fleshed sweet potato offers great opportunities for combating Vitamin A Deficiency, which, in Malawi, badly affects pregnant women and 60% of children under the age of five. Cf. 2013. “Rooting out hunger in Malawi with nutritious orange-fleshed sweet potato”. CIP, with Irish Aid’s financial support: https://www.irishaid.ie/media/irishaid/allwebsitemedia/20newsandpublications/publicationpdfsenglish/CIP-Rooting-out-hunger-in-Malawi-with-OFSP-m.pdf
[4] Friel, B. 1962. The Saucer of Larks. London: Victor Gollancz.