Southern Potato Conference Held: More Than 50% of Potatoes in China Will Be Consumed as a Staple Food by 2025

From December 17 to 18, the 2015 Southern Potato Conference was held in Enshi Tujia and Miao Autonomous Prefecture, Hubei Province, with more than 400 academic and industry professionals from home and abroad in attendance. According to statistics from the Potato Professional Committee of the Crop Science Society of China, from 2010 to 2014, China's average annual potato planting area reached 82.05 million mu, with an average annual total output of 90.81 million tons, of which the southern region accounted for 49% and 52% of the national average annual planting area and total output respectively. It is expected that by 2025, more than 50% of potatoes in China will be consumed as a staple food.

Lu Xiaoping, deputy director of the International Potato Center and director of its Asia-Pacific Center, said in his speech that two-thirds of the world's population already uses potatoes as a staple food, and annual per capita potato consumption in European and American countries reaches 85 kg; China's potato production areas highly overlap with poverty-stricken areas, and 549 of the country's 592 poverty-stricken counties use potatoes as a major crop.