The modern potato industry technology system is being built by the Ministry of Agriculture.
It focuses on demonstrating and promoting advanced, applicable, efficient, high-quality and water-saving cultivation techniques for dryland potatoes, accelerating the integration and transformation of agricultural scientific and technological achievements, and using this as a marker to drive the technological upgrading and sustainable development of China's potato industry. On July 22-23, the Department of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Agriculture, together with the Department of Crop Production, held the "National On-site Observation Meeting on Water-Saving, Efficient and High-Quality Cultivation Techniques for Dryland Potatoes" in Ulanqab, Inner Mongolia.
According to reports, the potato, used as both food, vegetable, feed and processing raw material, has now become the world's fourth largest food crop after rice, @#@245@#@ and corn. China is the country with the largest planting area in the world, reaching 80 million mu in 2006, covering almost every province, municipality and autonomous region, especially the arid regions of the west, where it has played a key role in poverty alleviation and increasing farmers' incomes. In recent years, China's potato processing enterprises have reached 4,000 to 5,000, among which more than 30 are refined starch processing enterprises with a capacity of over 10,000 tons, and the processing capacity reached about 1 million tons in 2006.
The Ministry of Agriculture has always attached great importance to the development of the potato industry, treating it as a strategic choice for ensuring food security, adjusting the agricultural production structure and increasing farmers' incomes, and is actively advancing the development of the potato industry.
Zhang Fengtong, Director of the Department of Science and Technology, told reporters that at present, compared with advanced countries, China's overall potato production level is still not high, with large differences between regions and an average yield of only 14 tons per hectare. There is still a relatively large gap in scientific research level compared with foreign countries, especially the lack of processing-specific varieties, insufficient application of high-yield cultivation techniques, and inadequate preservation, storage and processing technology. For this reason, in 2003, the Ministry of Agriculture launched the "Introduction, Innovation and Demonstration Promotion of Key Technologies for Potato Industry Development" 948 major rolling project, led by the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, organizing major advantageous scientific research forces across the country to carry out introduction, digestion, absorption and re-innovation around some major key common technologies in potato industry development, and cultivated a large number of new varieties with China's independent intellectual property rights; at the same time, combining regional characteristics, the introduced and already developed advanced and applicable technologies were applied to industry development, providing strong technical support for the development of the potato industry. In the future, the Ministry of Agriculture will also take products and technology as the main line to build a modern potato industry technology system.