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New $13.8m project aims to up banana production in Uganda and Tanzania
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Monday, 27 October, 2014, 08 : 00 AM [IST]
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fiogf49gjkf0d A new project - with an outlay of $13.8 million - is underway in Uganda and Tanzania to develop and distribute high-yielding, disease-resistant hybrid banana varieties. The effort is being funded by a grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA).
Rony Swennen, professor, KU Leuven, and head, banana breeding at IITA, is leading the project.
Bananas are a food staple and an economic backbone in East and Central Africa, where over half the cultivated land is planted with bananas. Uganda and Tanzania produce over 50 per cent of the bananas grown in Africa. The region’s yearly banana crop is valued at $4.3 billion.
However, banana production in the two countries achieves just nine per cent of its potential yield due to pests and diseases. This poses a serious threat to the future sustainability of banana production in the region.
A new five-year project aims to dramatically upscale and speed up existing banana breeding efforts in the two countries.
The researchers expect their hybrid banana varieties to have a 30 per cent higher yield and a 50 per cent higher resistance to at least three of the target pests and diseases compared to the current varieties grown by the farmers under the same on-farm conditions.
“The varieties would also meet over 90 per cent of the quality traits for consumers found in the current cultivars,” stated the researchers.
“One of the most effective ways to increase production of any crop is to plant high-yielding varieties,” said Swennen.
“This new project would expand the on-going breeding efforts in Uganda and Tanzania by developing research capacity and bringing expertise from other countries,” he added.
“Hence farmers would get faster access to high-yielding, high-resistance hybrids that are, at the same time, satisfactory to the consumer,” Swennen said.
The project builds on a very successful collaboration between IITA and Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO), which culminated in the development of the first 26 high-yielding, disease-resistant hybrid varieties, called NARITA varieties.
The project would also support the on-farm testing of these hybrids in Uganda and Tanzania; improve the technical capacity of the breeding programmes in the region; strengthen partnerships with farmers, and develop local human capacity by supporting eight Ph D projects and five MSc research projects.
The IITA, Bioversity International and the CGIAR Research Programme on Roots, Tubers and Bananas are also providing substantial co-financing.
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