Feeding the World -- After Climate Change

In the birthplace of the potato, things are heating up. Over the past decade, the Quechua farmers working at the El Parque de la Papa, outside Cusco, Peru, started noticing that the potato varieties they used to grow at lower altitudes can now only be cultivated much higher up the mountainside. “Temperate zones in the mountains are moving upwards—which is to say it’s getting warmer," says Shakeel Bhatti, Secretary of the International Treaty on Plant Genetic Resources for Food and Agriculture. Climate change, he says, is pushing temperatures up—and now he, his colleagues and the potato park farmers are looking for potato varieties that can adapt.