# Six Quechua communities hold 1,430 kinds of potato. 410 of them were handed back. > In the Andes above Pisac, farmers run a 12,000-hectare park as a living seed bank. In 2004 the world's biggest potato genebank returned hundreds of varieties to the people whose ancestors bred them. - **Publisher:** VOTVS (Fair coverage for everyone) — https://votvs.com - **Author:** VOTVS - **Published:** 2026-08-19 - **Language:** en - **Topic:** Foodways - **Canonical URL:** https://votvs.com/ar/articles/potato-park-peru-seed-keepers - **Tags:** food, peru, indigenous, biodiversity - **Facts last verified:** 19 August 2026 --- In the Andes above Pisac, in Peru's Cusco region, six Quechua communities run a park. It is not a park in the sense of a place you visit to look at things. It is a working landscape of about **12,000 hectares**, according to the International Potato Center, farmed collectively — and it functions as one of the most important living seed banks on earth. They hold **1,430 varieties of potato**. ## What that number is made of Local Biodiversity Outlooks, a project run alongside the UN Convention on Biological Diversity, breaks the collection down: **Figure (BarSet):** How the Potato Park's collection was assembled — Local Biodiversity Outlooks. Totals 1,430 cultivars. The park holds six of the nine cultivated potato species, two semi-cultivated species and six wild relatives. Individual farmers within it may personally grow well over a hundred cultivars. Not a collection in jars. A collection in the ground, replanted every year, by people who can tell the varieties apart. ## The 410 The middle bar is the part that should be better known. The International Potato Center in Lima holds the largest potato genebank in the world. Much of what is in it came, originally, from Andean farming communities — gathered by researchers over decades of collecting expeditions. In **2004**, CIP and the Potato Park communities signed a repatriation agreement. **410 native varieties went back** to the communities whose ancestors had bred them. The agreement also formally recognised indigenous peoples' rights in relation to the biodiversity they maintain. It is worth being precise about what this is and is not. It is not compensation, and it does not undo the collecting. It is an agreement, renewed since, between a research institution and a group of communities, in which the flow of material ran in the unusual direction. ## Why so many potatoes To an outsider, 1,430 varieties looks like extravagance. It is the opposite: it is insurance, and it is engineered. Andean farmers plant different varieties at different altitudes, in different soils, with different tolerances — some for frost, some for drought, some for a specific pest, some because they taste better, some because they store through a winter. A field is a portfolio. This is precisely the property industrial agriculture gave away. A commercial potato crop is typically a handful of genetically uniform varieties, which is efficient right up until something arrives that all of them are susceptible to. Ireland learned that in the 1840s with a much narrower genetic base than the Andes has ever had. And the hedge is being tested now. Barbara Wells, then Director General of CIP, described the *papa arariwa* — the potato guardians — as actively searching for ways to handle the pests and diseases arriving with a warming climate. In the Andes that warming has a direction: cultivation moves up the mountain, and above a certain point there is no more mountain. ## Who benefits The park's communities have built the arrangement around collective benefit rather than individual sale — local microenterprises tied to the crop diversity itself, so that keeping many varieties in the ground is what generates the income, rather than something farmers do at a cost to themselves. That design matters. Conservation schemes that ask poor farmers to maintain diversity as a public service, unpaid, tend to fail — not because farmers do not value the varieties, but because nobody can absorb that cost indefinitely. ## Questions people ask ### What is the Potato Park in Peru? Parque de la Papa is an indigenous biocultural territory in the Andes near Pisac, in Peru's Cusco region, run collectively by six Quechua communities through the Association of Communities of the Potato Park. The International Potato Center puts its area at around 12,000 hectares. ### How many potato varieties does it hold? 1,430 cultivars, according to Local Biodiversity Outlooks — 778 gathered from local and surrounding communities, 85 added through exchanges and donations, and 410 returned under a repatriation agreement. It holds six of the nine cultivated potato species, two semi-cultivated species and six wild relatives. ### What was the 2004 repatriation agreement? An agreement between the Potato Park communities and the International Potato Center, the world's largest potato genebank, under which 410 native varieties were returned to the communities whose ancestors bred them. It also recognised indigenous peoples' rights over the biodiversity they conserve. ### Why does potato diversity matter? A single variety can be wiped out by one pest, one disease or one shift in climate. Andean farmers hedge against that by growing many varieties at many altitudes. As warming pushes cultivation higher up the mountain, that stock of genetic variation is what makes adaptation possible. ## Sources - The story of the Potato Park — Local Biodiversity Outlooks (UN Convention on Biological Diversity partnership). https://localbiodiversityoutlooks.net/the-story-of-the-potato-park/ - Peru's 'potato guardians' protect native varieties for future generations — International Potato Center (CIP), 6 June 2016. https://cipotato.org/blog/perus-potato-guardians-protect-native-varieties-future-generations/ - The Potato Park of Peru — Heinrich Böll Stiftung, 25 January 2016. https://www.boell.de/en/2016/01/25/potato-park-peru --- Published by VOTVS. Free to quote with attribution and a link to https://votvs.com/ar/articles/potato-park-peru-seed-keepers.