The Canary Islands are on the verge of potato shortages. Several supermarkets have begun to limit the number of tubers that each customer can take and those that remain are paid five times more than they were two years ago..

The problem is that the Canary Islands do not produce all the potatoes they consume. The stocks arrive, more or less, until the beginning of October: the rest have to be imported, usually from England. However, this year the perfect storm has formed: the Canarian harvest has been catastrophic, around a fifth of what is usually normal, and English potato producers have raised an alert due to the presence of the Colorado beetle. in their crops, which prevents them from being exported to the Canary Islands.

Along with the Guatemala moth, the Colorado beetle is the worst enemy of the potato. The insect feeds on the leaves of the plant, preventing it from capturing light for the photosynthetic process and causing its death.. If not stopped in the early stages, the Colorado beetle becomes a pest that is practically impossible to eradicate..

The Government published a ministerial order in 1987 preventing island territories from importing plant organisms from countries with phytosanitary alerts.. “The situation has changed a lot since that order, which was published 35 years ago,” explains Alberto Duque, responsible for potato cultivation at the Coordinator of Farmers and Livestock Organizations (COAG).. “At that time there was a long list of places free of the beetle that has been reduced to a minimum. Now there are hardly any northern European countries left, because the cold is not favorable to the beetle, but the high temperatures have caused them to emerge in Kent, England, a place where we had never seen them.”.

The Canary Islands imported 90% of the potatoes they received that year from England. With that door closed, the options are reduced: find another importer or lift the veto and assume that the Colorado beetle is going to reach the islands.. To Duque, this last option does not sound crazy: “It is a decision that the Cabildo must adopt.”. The ideal would be not to have a beetle, but now we can't even import from the Peninsula, this would open doors.”.

Even with skyrocketing prices, potatoes are a cheap product. Unlike bananas or oranges, which cross oceans every day to reach supermarkets around the world, it is not profitable to transport potatoes over long distances.. That is why producers like Poland or Sweden are usually left out of the equation..

For Victoria Delgado, president of the Agrarian Association of Young Farmers (Asaga) in the Canary Islands, there are intermediate options. “The alert has been launched only in England.. So why does the ban extend to the entire United Kingdom? “We ask that each country be analyzed, one by one, and also that the import of potatoes not be treated the same as that of their seeds.”.

According to Delgado, the deficit in potatoes has only to do with normal-sized potatoes, those consumed in the rest of the Peninsula, and not with old potatoes, as has been published in some of the press, which are smaller. size and are used to make wrinkled potatoes. “The old potato is produced here in the Canary Islands and we have the seeds, there is no problem there,” says Delgado.. “The issue is with normal potatoes, which are present in most of the popular dishes of the Canary Islands and right now are skyrocketing in price.. when you find them”.

A bunch of problems

Increasing potato plantations in the Canary Islands does not seem like an option either.. Water in the Canary Islands is paid twice as much as the communities that pay the most in the Peninsula, so farmers opt for more profitable products: “Bananas. The banana has no rival in the rest of Spain, while the Canarian potato would be like the others, and a lot of it is produced on the Peninsula, only with higher production costs,” says Duque..

Another reason for not expanding the crop is the presence of the Guatemalan moth on the islands.. Unlike the beetle, it does not kill the plant, but eats the inside of the tuber, making the merchandise unfit for sale.. “It arrived in the Canary Islands in the suitcase of a passenger who came from Latin America five years ago and we still have not managed to eradicate it,” says Victoria Delgado..

However, what worries Canarian consumers and producers the most is that this is not a one-time event, but rather that the dynamics can lead the islands to suffer a shortage of potatoes every year.. “The heat of the month of March has wiped out almost all production. On the island of Tenerife it has been dramatic. The problem is that hot springs are occurring more and more and we have no alternative,” explains Victoria Delgado..

Some supermarkets have started to wage war on their own and import from countries like Egypt. Duque, from COAG, doesn't think it's a good idea: “The Egyptian potato is of poor quality and comes with certificates that God knows who backs them up.”. We have already had several cases in which we start to analyze tomatoes from Morocco and see that they do not comply with the regulations, but of course, then we start calling and the company that issues the certificate does not even exist.. “We should be more careful with this.”.