In Africa, Potatoes are grown under a wide range of conditions - and more of them each year: from irrigated commercial farms in Egypt and South Africa to intensively cultivated tropical highland zones of Eastern and Central Africa, where it is mainly a small farmer's crop. Most of the sweetpotato varieties grown in Africa are diverse landraces, selected by farmers for adaptation and taste. Uganda is the largest producer of sweet potato in Africa and the sweet potato ranks third in importance as a stable food after bananas and cassava. Local standards call for a dry-matter content ranging from 28 to 35%. Sweet potatoes were a main food of European people living in America in the 1500s, 1600s, and 1700s AD. The OFSP is a crop that has gone under biofortification. After his first voyage to the Americas in 1492, Christopher Columbus took sweet potatoes back home to Europe. The tradition was soon brought to America during slavery, where the African slaves transformed the dessert into something sweeter using yams, then sweet potatoes. Sweet potatoes are New World tubers that were adopted by enslaved Africans on the American continent. Into the 20th century, sweet potatoes were often associated with poverty as oftentimes it was all some people had to eat. It is easier to grow as it requires … History by region South America. They could be grown in the temperate climates; they could be stored in mounds and used as needed to supplement meager rations. This benefit may be particularly true for children. It wasn’t until after the 1740’s that the term sweet potato began to be used by American colonists to distinguish it from the white (Irish) potato. Soon after, inventor George Washington Carver began to find various uses for the sweet potato, including in a candied version. It matures fast, is rich in nutrients, and is often the first crop planted after a natural disaster, providing abundant food for otherwise starving populations. Sweet potato production in Uganda. It can be kept for some time in the soil as a reserve crop, withstands extreme weather conditions, and performs well in marginal soils. In the late part of the 19th century, Fannie Famer featured a recipe for glazed sweet potatoes in the Boston Cooking School Cookbook. CIP’s multi-stakeholder partnership program Sweetpotato for Profit and Health Initiative (SPHI) has set a goal of reaching 10 million households across 17 Sub-Saharan Africa countries over the next 10 years to achieve a widespread uptake of sweetpotato that will significantly reduce malnutrition among children under the age of five. The sweet potato, maybe native to tropical America introduced to Western Africa by the Portuguese in the 1500s. The part you eat is the root of the vine plant. In this new building, there is a processing room with washing and peeling facilities, a chipping machine and a solar dryer where sweet potato chips can be dried very quickly. How the Potato Changed the World ... in a biological bedlam that underlies much of the history we learn in school. In most of sub-Saharan Africa, people only knew of sweet potato varieties that were white inside — the types that came to Africa from South America in the 1600s. Sweet potatoes — which were less sweet and not as orange as we know them today — worked as an effective substitute and reminded them of home. In several African countries, including Uganda and Mozambique, subsistence farmers grow a lot of sweet potatoes. The crop was introduced into China in the late 16th century and spread through Asia, Africa, and Latin America during the 17th and 18th centuries. In recent decades, production has been in continual expansion, rising from 2 million tonnes in 1960 to over 30 million tonnes in 2013. During that Civil War, Confederate soldiers, who moved from battle to battle, often had to scavenge for their own food and would rely on the sweet potato greens that they stumbled upon. Spanish traders quickly brought sweet potatoes to sell in Africa, India and China, and by the 1600s many people in China ate sweet potatoes as their main food instead of rice. China is the largest in the production and cultivation of sweet potatoes in the world. They came out with a sweet potato variety they called Covington, which had begun as a botanical seed in … When cooked in the ashes of a dying fire, they were a sweet treat at the end of a bone-tiring day of toil. Sweet potato pie recipes made a cookbook debut in the 18th century. Potatoes dating to about 2000 BC have been found at Huaynuma, in the Casma Valley of Peru, and early potatoes dating to 800-500 BC were also uncovered at the Altiplano site of Chiripa on the east side of Lake Titicaca. In the potato world, Africa's most populous country, Nigeria, stands out: it is the fourth biggest producer of potato in sub-Saharan Africa, has almost as much land under potato as Germany, and potato output has grown sevenfold over the past decade, reaching 843 000 tonnes in 2007.