Peruvian botanist, agronomist and world authority on potatoes. Carlos Ochoa was born in Cusco, Peru, and as a boy dreamed of studying medicine in Paris. His father opposed the plan and instead Ochoa studied agriculture at the University of San Simon in Cochabamba, Bolivia, and the University of Minnesota, U.S.A. One of his early projects in agronomy was at a government research centre in Concepción, Peru, conducting genetic experiments on wheat. However, Ochoa believed that the nation should concentrate on the staple crop that had been cultivated there for thousands of years, namely the potato, and in 1947 spearheaded a potato breeding programme with an ambitious hybridisation plan using native varieties as progenitors. Two of the early varieties he created, the cultivars 'Renacimiento' and 'Tomasa Condemayta', are still in cultivation today.
Ochoa made significant collections of wild potatoes and was the first to describe nearly a third of the 200 wild potato species currently known, plucking his specimens from some of the farthest reaches of the Andes at great effort (he was once accused of being a spy in Ecuador and was caught up in guerrilla warfare in Peru). He carefully studied the work of Russian scientist Nikolai Vavilov, who had some decades earlier revealed the great diversity of cultivated and wild potato species. Ochoa also rediscovered the wild potato found by Charles Darwin on his 1835 voyage aboard the Beagle, growing on the coast of Chile. Ochoa recalled Darwin's journal entry about the tall plant and its tubers, which he found in sandy soil near the beach of Low's Harbour on Guayteca Island. When Ochoa travelled to the same beach in 1969 he found the same potato, which had not been recorded again since Darwin's time. It was named Solanum ochoanum in honour of the potato expert, who believed it must have once been a cultivated species transported to the shore by sailors.
Ochoa joined the International Potato Center (CIP) in 1971, where he worked on the systematics of Andean cultivated and wild potatoes, contributing substantially to the Center's potato genebank and wrote extensively, producing major monographs on the potatoes of Bolivia and Peru. His last major work, published in 2006, was a book on the ethnobotany of Peru, co-authored with Donald Ugent. Ochoa was Professor Emeritus at the State Agricultural University of La Molina, Peru, and received many accolades during his lifetime including Distinguished Economic Botanist, the Alan Shaw Feinstein World Hunger Award and the Inter-American Science Prize. He died in Lima in 2008.
