CIAT 24 August, 2015 by Georgina Smith (comments)

Disappearing under a thick canopy of leaves, Tran Thi Ha is quick to point out five different types of the root crop cassava on her farm – and their somewhat unusual uses. “We use the stems of cassava stakes as a medium to grow mushrooms,” she says, pointing to a line of cut cassava stems.

Nestling in the foothills of Vietnam’s Ba Vi National park, around 65 kilometers west of Hanoi, this is considered a hotspot of root and tuber crop biodiversity.  “This cassava variety is delicious – we boil the roots to eat and the leaves to feed to the fish,” she says.

But like most in her community, the majority of her cassava is a high-starch bitter variety, processed into starch. In this commune, cassava fetches around three times more income than other crops, like maize or rice.

Different varieties are cultivated by the commune’s 1,400 farmers, mostly from ethnic communities, who live higher up in the hills, such as the Muong and Dao ethnic minority groups.

Although the economic value of cassava is the key concern for most farmers here, Nguyen Van Kien, from the Plant Resources Center’s Plant Genebank Management Division in Hanoi, Vietnam, observes Tran Thi Ha’s field from a different perspective.

Updating genetic passports

Those passports – like something out of a futuristic sci-fi movie – contain digital information about each accession’s DNA – type, origin and collection history – a complete library of genetic reference material. Now, the information contained about them will be updated using the latest technology in DNA fingerprinting.

The Plant Resources Center and International Center for Tropical Agriculture will work together to identify local and improved cassava varieties in farmer’s fields like Tran Thi Ha’s, by extracting DNA samples from the field, and shipping them to CIAT’s headquarters in Colombia to be fingerprinted with genetic markers and analyzed for diversity patterns.

PRC is the latest to join a network of national partners in Vietnam, including the Agricultural Genetics Institute, the Institute of Agricultural Sciences and Hung Loc Research Station, which together with CIAT, will build a complete reference library of cassava collections, to evaluate cassava varieties which farmers actually have in their fields.