One Woman in Chile Tends 120 Potato Varieties by Hand — Here's the System Behind Her, and 3,999 Others

When people picture seed preservation, the image is usually a gene bank — climate-controlled, catalogued, frozen in time. That's a real and essential part of potato diversity preservation. But it's only half the story. The other half runs through individual farmers, mostly women, actively growing dozens or hundreds of traditional varieties by hand, year after year, across the Andes and southern Chile.

Native potatoes from the Andes represent an extraordinary depth of biodiversity: more than 4,000 documented landraces — traditional, locally adapted varieties, distinct from modern commercial cultivars — plus 107 wild Solanum species, carrying genetic, nutritional, adaptive, and cultural traits accumulated over thousands of years of Andean cultivation and selection. The International Potato Center (CIP), headquartered in Lima, Peru, maintains the institutional backbone of this preservation effort: a gene bank holding more than 7,500 total accessions, including over 4,500 landraces and over 3,000 wild relatives, together representing an estimated 85% of all documented Solanum genetic diversity — making it the largest potato crop collection in the world by a wide margin.

What makes CIP's approach genuinely distinctive is what happens after material enters the gene bank. Since 2006, CIP's repatriation program has actively returned more than 1,800 potato varieties from institutional storage back into active cultivation by Andean farmers, reaching more than 15,000 households across Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. The measured result: yield improvements of 10-15% — equivalent to 5-12 additional tonnes per hectare — for participating households. That's a concrete economic case for diversity preservation, not just a cultural or scientific one. A separate, longer-running effort, working through the Parque de la Papa ("Potato Park") in Peru with Asociación ANDES and IIED, has returned more than 400 additional accessions to indigenous communities since 2002.

Across the Andean highlands and the islands of southern Chile specifically, rural women function as the primary custodians of native potato diversity in actual practice — a role that formal conservation literature, focused heavily on institutional gene banks, has historically under-recognized. In Chile's Chiloé archipelago, farmers Mirna Oyarzún and Esmerinda Culún each maintain roughly 35 potato genotypes annually. Yolanda Millapichún tends 120 genotypes specifically repatriated from the Potato Germplasm Bank over roughly two decades of continuous cultivation — a single individual's work standing in directly for the repatriation-to-active-farming pipeline the whole program depends on.

In Bolivia, the organization PROSUCO, working with CIP through FAO support, collaborates with female seed guardians on the altiplano who protect 23 native potato varieties and 6 maize varieties. In Peru, the Association of Guardians of Native Potatoes (AGUAPAN) operates across nine regions, with a substantial share of its membership made up of women conserving native varieties — and CIP specifically supports a Leadership Program for the Empowerment of AGUAPAN Women Producers and Marketers, pairing conservation work with commercial and organizational skill-building, treating diversity preservation and economic empowerment as genuinely linked goals rather than separate initiatives running in parallel.

Native potato diversity faces compounding threats: climate change altering the specific highland conditions many landraces are adapted to, disease and pest pressure, and — distinct from any purely biological threat — socioeconomic pressure pushing younger generations away from small-scale traditional cultivation toward other livelihoods, putting generational continuity itself at risk. CIP's response deliberately combines in-situ conservation (active cultivation, as described above) with ex-situ conservation (gene bank storage), treating the two as complementary rather than interchangeable. A gene bank can preserve genetic material indefinitely, but it can't replicate the ongoing adaptive selection that happens only when a variety keeps getting grown under real, changing field conditions, season after season, by someone who knows it well enough to keep choosing it.