Space age crop thrives in Tibet
Print Edition
An unusual-looking crop with dark-red spikes and purple-green leaves is flourishing along the banks and valleys of the Lhasa and Yarklungtsangpo rivers, despite a lasting drought on the roof of the world.
“A bumper harvest of quinoa is expected this autumn on the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau,” said Gongbo Tashi, a professor at the agricultural college of Tibet University, who introduced the crop to China.
A 200-hectare plot of quinoa will yield 250,000 kilograms of grain, said Huang Zhaogang, president of a quinoa company and Gongbo Tashi’s business partner.
Quinoa has been cultivated in South America for more than 5,000 years and its health benefits include high protein and mineral content.
The so-called super grain is highly nutritious, drought resistant and salt tolerant, making it popular with many industrialized countries.
It is so nutritious that NASA feeds it to its astronauts on space missions, making it a candidate for the Controlled Ecological Life Support System in spaceships, which will grow crops.
Experts say quinoa responds well to controlled environments with large increases in seed production, maintenance of short canopy stature, and increased harvest index.
The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization named 2013 the International Year of Quinoa in recognition of its “potential contribution to the fight against hunger and malnutrition.”
Gongbo Tashi had the idea of introducing the crop to Tibet after reading a report in an English newspaper.
He said quinoa was quite adaptable and would be suitable for high altitude areas, usually 3,000 or 4,000 meters above sea level, making the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau a desirable new home for the plant.
“It will help improve the health of locals,” he said. Meat and barley are the core foods eaten by Tibetans in the cold highlands, but they are not comprehensively nutritious and believed to be a factor affecting their life expectancy.
Gongbo Tashi sought technological support from a leading quinoa producer in the United States in 1987.
Then he went to study in the International Maize and Wheat Improvement Center in Mexico in 1988, where he attended classes by Norman Borlaug, the 1970 Nobel laureate called “the father of the Green Revolution.”
Gongbo Tashi brought seeds back to Tibet and, in the early 1990s, the Tibetan government approved a quinoa cultivation project.
After a few failed experiments, Gongbo Tashi and his team cooperated with Huang, and they successfully grew the crop in Qinghai Province. Since 2010, they have planted quinoa on a large scale in the Tibetan counties of Lhoka, Chushu and Lhatse.
In more than 20 years, his team have bred several new varieties to suit the environment and condition of the plateau, and named one of the variants “Quinoa of Tibetan Dream.”
Gongbo Tashi and Huang have helped Tibetan farmers double their incomes through the new crop which they hope will become the first Tibet-grown food to be exported overseas.
Gongbo Tashi studied at China’s Northwest Agriculture College in the late 1970s and earned his master of science degree from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2006.
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