Potatoes are root of the solution

Beijing - The government is looking at root and tuber crops, especially potato and sweet potato, to ensure adequate food supply for its rising population.

Xie Kaiyun, a leading potato scientist at the Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, said increased planting and yield of potato and sweet potato alone is expected to help achieve the country' s ambitious target of increasing its grain output by around 10 percent to more than 550 million tons in the next decade.

Official figures include potatoes in grain output, but only at a weighting of 20 percent. So five tons of potato is treated as one ton of grain.