This tuberous root vegetable originates from Southeast Asia, particularly the Philippines, and is often confused with taro root. Purple yams have greyish-brown skins and purple flesh, and their texture becomes soft like a potato when cooked.  They have a sweet, nutty flavor and are used in a variety of dishes ranging from sweet to savory.  Taro root (Colocasia esculenta), on the other hand,  is a root vegetable with a milder sweet taste.  Taro is grown from the tropical taro plant and is not one of the nearly 600 types of yams.

Raw ube is a perennial climbing herb with flesh color ranging from white to red deep purple. The shape of an ube ranges from round to cylindrical and its flesh is watery/slimy  in texture.  In the Philippines, it is grown particularly in the Northern Luzon, Southern Tagalog, Bicol, Central Visayas, and Northern Mindanao regions, usually  in small patches of land. Raw ube tubers are seasonally available and are oftentimes in short supply.

This purple variety of yam is today’s most expensive and important root crop in the Philippines  due to its high demand in the food processing industry and its therapeutic values.  The purple yam industry value chain, however, encounters recurring problems of seasonal production, overproduction, and the rejection of farmers’ harvests that could not be readily absorbed by the existing market, coupled with problems on the availability of quality planting materials and lack of farmers’ awareness on care and management tissue culture yam plantlets.

To address this problem, the Philippine Department of Agriculture (DA), in partnership with the University of the Philippines, Los Baños, Laguna (UPLB) and the different DA regional field offices, has implemented a project that provides farmers with enough tissue-culture yam plantlets and trains them in the handling and management of tissue-culture plantlets and overall cultural management for yam production.

A similar project named, “Upscaling Business and Engineering Technology (UBE-Tech) for the Purple Yam Industry in the Northern Philippines”,  was implemented in 2017 by the Don Mariano Marcos Memorial State University, with the support of the USAID.   This project aimed to help farmers, entrepreneurs and researchers improve production of ube by upscaling and establishing viable, locally generated technology for value-added products and extraction of bioactive compounds from anthocyanin-rich Philippine purple yam (Dioscorea alata) varieties.

Sample Recipes of Filipino Ube Desserts: