The New York Times has the scoop:
Peruvian agronomists, historians and diplomats are chafing at an assertion by Marigen Hornkohl, Chile’s agriculture minister, who said Monday, “Few people know that 99 percent of the world’s potatoes have some type of genetic link to potatoes from Chile.”
Peru, where the potato is a source of national pride, could not let such a comment pass. “Obviously the world has known for centuries that the potato is from Peru and that the Peruvian potato saved Europe from hunger,” Foreign Minister José Antonio García Belaúnde told reporters here last week. “The entire world knows this.”
And if some parts of the world did not have an inkling of the importance of Peru’s potatoes, Peru is trying to remedy that through events organized here around the International Year of the Potato, decreed by the United Nations to promote the potato’s potential role in easing food shortages in poor countries.
This war of words comes, of course, on the heels of the death of J.R. Simplot, the inventor of the frozen French fry and, apparently, the man who was keeping the potato world from an apocalyptic Sunni-vs.-Shia-esque rift. Who will save us now?
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