New research to help banana farmers in Tanzania and Uganda

A new $13.8m project is set to help smallholder banana farmers develop and distribute higher-yielding, disease-resistant hybrid banana varieties in Tanzania and Uganda.

The International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) is working on the project with funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The IITA, Bioversity International and the CGIAR Research Programme on Roots, Tubers and Bananas is also co-financing the project.

The five-year project will work towards up scaling and speeding up existing banana breeding efforts in both the countries.

The research is expected to produce hybrid banana varieties that will have a 30% higher yield and a 50% higher resistance to at least three of the target pests and diseases compared with the current varieties in production. Researchers also claim that the varieties will meet over 90% of the quality traits for consumers.

Banana is considered to be a staple food and an economic backbone for East and Central Africa where more than half of all cultivable land is planted with banana. Tanzania and Uganda is said to produce more than 50% of all the banana production in Africa, with the two places generating around $4.3bn in sales.

However, pests and diseases led to both Tanzania and Uganda producing only 9% of its potential yield which posed a serious threat to the future of banana production in the region.

The project is being led by a professor at KU Leuven and head of banana breeding at IITA Rony Swennen.

Speaking about the project, Swennen said: "One of the most effective ways to increase production of any crop is to plant high-yielding varieties. This new project will expand the on-going breeding efforts in Uganda and Tanzania by developing research capacity and bringing expertise from other countries. Hence farmers will get faster access to high-yielding, high-resistance hybrids that are at the same time satisfactory to the consumer."

The project is the result of a partnership between IITA and Uganda’s National Agricultural Research Organisation (NARO), which led to the development of the first 26 high-yielding, and disease-resistant hybrid varieties, called NARITA varieties.

The project will also test these hybrids on farm and is expected to improve the technical capacity of the breeding programmes in the region. It also claims that it will be able to strengthen partnerships with farmers.

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Image: The research aims to help banana farmers develop and distribute higher-yielding, disease-resistant hybrid bananas. Photo: courtesy of KU Leuven.