Qu Dongyu is a potato enthusiast. And this despite the fact that the Secretary-General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) is actually the son of rice farmers. The agricultural scientist wrote his doctoral thesis on new techniques in the production of potato seeds, in 2004 he brought the International Potato Congress to China for the first time, and as vice governor of the autonomous region of Ningxia, he traveled from farm to farm to convince farmers in the mountains of western China of the benefits of new potato varieties.