UN Honours Humble Spud With Year of the Potato

It spends much of its time trying to grapple with issues of global importance such as Iran's nuclear program or how to solve the crisis in Dafur. So the decision by the United Nations to launch a year-long celebration of the solanum tuberosum - better known to most as the humble spud - has come as something of a surprise.

The organization has declared 2008 the International Year of the Potato in recognition of the honest crop which is eaten around the world by a billion people every year.

The UN says that the role of the potato in fighting global poverty is vital and its influence is on the increase with our appetite for the carbohydrate staple expected to double in the next 12 years.

With the world's population due to increase over the next two decades by more than 100 million people a year, mostly in the developing world, it is high time to promote the potato.

Easy to farm and high in energy and vitamin C, the UN says that the potato, which first came to Europe from Latin America in the 1500s, will be central to achieving its millennium development goal to reduce by half the numbers living in extreme poverty by 2015.

The aim of its tribute, it says, is to engage farmers, scientists and government policymakers to recognize the value of the potato and promote its production, consumption and trade.

Individual varieties of the vegetable, which was first cultivated 8,000 years ago in Bolivia, are being paraded in promotional material as part of the campaign, everything from the atahualpa, a pink, Peruvian variety, to the kipfler, an elongated German potato. There are 5,000 different types in the Andes alone.

But the UN's campaign has attracted criticism.

"Have they nothing better to do with their time? Maybe ending slavery, slaughter in the Sudan, women's rights ... minor stuff like that?" wrote one blogger on an anti-UN website.

Similarly when the decision to adopt the potato was made back in 2005, the then UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, suggested the organization was in danger of diverting its focus from other, more pressing world issues.

But agricultural experts have hailed the move which they say will finally allow the world's third most important crop to dust off its jacket and receive proper recognition as a foodstuff we would be hard pressed to live without.