Potato Breeding: Theory and Practice

The potato (Solanum tuberosum) is the world’s fourth most important food crop after maize, rice and wheat with 377 million tonnes fresh-weight of tubers produced in 2016 from 19.2 million hectares of land, in 163 countries, giving a global average yield of 19.6 t ha^-1 (http://faostat.fao.org). About 62% of production (234 million tonnes) was in Asia (191), Africa (25) and Latin America (18) as a result of steady increases in recent years, particularly in China and India. As a major food cro...