The Empire Potato Collection: Imperial Bioprospecting, Plant Quarantine, and the Remaking of a British Staple

• In Event: Locating Extractive Development in Latin America

Abstract

In 1939, the British Imperial Agricultural Bureaux dispatched three plant collectors to South America in search of “indigenous wild and cultivated” potatoes. During eight months in transit through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina, members of the expedition assembled materials for a new Empire Potato Collection. Intended to supply agricultural workers in the British Isles and beyond with potato breeding materials, the collection continues to fulfil a similar function today as the Commonwealth Potato Collection. In this paper, I examine the transit of potatoes and knowledge about them from various sites in South America to Cambridge (UK), where the Empire Potato Collection was initially housed, and explore the subsequent fates of Andean potatoes in British fields. As I show, imperial potato bioprospecting was facilitated by the expertise of South American scientists and depended on the development of novel infrastructures for mitigating the introduction of potato diseases. Although initially imagined as a once-and-done activity, it also proved to be a long-term investment, demanding decades of labor in evaluation, documentation, and curation of often-unwieldy living plant materials. I argue that the complexities of bioprospecting in practice upend narratives of both straightforward extractivism and clear-cut breeding innovation that dominate histories of crop development.

Author

• Helen Anne Curry, Georgia Institute of Technology