Project title: 1: Improving Seed Potato Quality in South-Western Uganda by Designing

Alternative Technologies and Supply Systems

1 Institution:
st
Wageningen
2nd Institution: Cork
Assoc. Partner: Depending on the candidate country; among possible partners: USP Brazil,
UTalca Chile
Key words (4-6): Irish potato, positive selection, virus diseases, degeneration, regeneration, seed
supply systems

Increasingly, the potato crop is playing a role in the livelihoods of people in Eastern Africa,
because potato is important as a “hunger-busting” crop. The project will focus on possible
development actions to improve the quality of seed potatoes in South Western Uganda, where the
majority of the national potato production takes place and where disease incidence is high.
Previous work by Wageningen University under the guidance of the first supervisor (Gildemacher
et al., 2009a, b, 2011; Hirpa et al., 2010) demonstrated that poor quality of seed potatoes is one of
the main impediments to realizing high potato yields. Most farmers reuse their own potatoes as
seed potatoes in the following season. The quality of seed potatoes degrades rapidly over
generations due to accumulation of seed-borne pathogens and pests, including viruses. This
degeneration results in significant reductions in yield. While there is a small formal seed system
based on disease free seed potatoes in Uganda (derived from in vitro multiplication followed by
hydroponics), this formal seed system only provides 2% of the national seed potatoes. Most
farmers do not have access to these certified seed potatoes due to lack of capital and knowledge or
transportation limitations. Therefore, there is a need to develop specific, local solutions to the
supply of high quality seed potatoes, which can increase the productivity and quality of the ware
production chain and enhance opportunities for processing into a diversity of products. The
situation is further complicated by the fact that there are two growing seasons within one calendar
year, making not only seed health an important issue but also the physiological quality of the seed
tubers essential for performance.
Potential solutions include:
- Creating a potato chain that will increase the price difference between seed and ware
so that seed growers can afford to invest more in their seed crops.
- Creating awareness that seed potatoes must meet certain standards and that the seed
does not consist of what is rejected as ware.
- Establishing low-tech but specialised and local seed potato farms, with proper
management of pests and diseases, supported by negative selection and by storage facilities that
guarantee optimization of physiological quality of the seed.
- Positive selection of seed potatoes by individual farmers: reversing the degeneration
process of the seed by selecting the best plants before senescence for seed use.
- Alternative methods of rapid multiplication carried out by local farmers.
Especially the potential of positive selection is promising but poorly investigated and should
therefore be the core of the project. The project will therefore focus on the agronomic aspects of
reversing degeneration by positive selection and the socio-economic aspects of implementing this
at large scale. To increase the impact of the research, simple modelling approaches will be
included for estimating the change across generations of virus titre per individual tuber and
frequency of infected tubers per seed lot allowing to predict the consequences these changes have
for the seed system at large and for the widespread uptake of the new technology.
Key research questions (2-4):
1. Can we reverse seed degeneration by intensive positive selection through action
research?
2 How to integrate the existing production of healthy seed material in specialised
institutions based on in vitro multiplication of plantlets and semi-controlled production of
minitubers in hydroponics with a system of intensive positive selection by farmers which limits or
even reverses seed degeneration, resulting in a functional, affordable and flexible, tailor-made
alternative seed potato system?
3. How large will the demand of such an alternative seed potato system be and how can
we maximize the benefits of having healthy seed tubers at farm level?
4. What will be the agronomic, social and socio-economic bottlenecks for the
widespread uptake of such an alternative seed potato technology?

Required competences:
Agronomy, Virus detection techniques, Modelling, Socio-economic research skills