PW CONFERENCE Ruud Huirne, LEI: ‘The potato contains fewer calories per 100 grams, that is where our opportunities lie’ WE ARE LOCKED IN EACH OTHER’S GRIP, AND NOBODY IS HAPPY ‘Yes, there definitely is a crisis in the food and agricultural sector’, commented professor Ruud Huirne. With this, he was reacting to the slogan ‘Make the Recession into an Opportunity’ and the ensuing supposition that the potato sector is suffering because of it. ‘The prices are really very bad’, is also what the director of the Dutch Agricultural Economics Research Institute (LEI) had noticed. ’But that is not the leitmotif that runs through it all; there are really big differences between the businesses. You are now asking: to what extent has the potato sector been hit? I cannot yet give an answer to that really, because we have to wait for next year to know that for sure.’ Nevertheless, the professor tried to say something meaningful about the situation. ‘Everyone knows that the situation is very serious.’ Complaining doesn’t help The professor recounted again what had happened in the world of food prices in recent years: ‘Low cereal prices, low milk prices, low potato prices, they are the topics of the day. But does it help if we keep complaining? We are locked in each other’s grip, and nobody is happy.’ We would do better to talk about solutions and challenges. Quite a number of people have already thought about these. And what was the outcome? The demand for field crops will double in the coming decades, as a result of both an increasing demand for food and for fuel. The reason is that the world population will continue to grow.’ If there is one country in the world and one branch that can give an answer to that, it is certainly the Dutch potato sector, was Huirne’s view. How could we do that? ’Our approach is that we must utilise the organic potential as much as possible, by bringing in higher hectare yields, breeding better varieties and by using new technologies such as GPS.’ To-do list But there are more ways of tackling the increasing need for food. ‘We are throwing out 20 percent of our food. We can reduce that.’ In the form of a four-leaf clover, the professor shows which factors will be top of the ‘to-do list’ for the food sectors in the coming years. The first leaf 12 Potato World 2010 • number 1 Pagina 11
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