Publications: About ISAAA

Yes, We Will Have Bananas 
Rejuvenating Banana Orchards in Eastern Africa

Banana is a major food staple and a source of income for over 20 million people in eastern Africa, many of them resource-poor women farmers. Yet production is less than half the level it could be and continues to decline steadily as pests and diseases tighten their grip on the region's aging banana orchards. 

That could all change, if farmers could only obtain the clean, high-quality planting materials they need to regenerate their plantations. Under a project developed and brokered by ISAAA, the Kenya Agricultural Research Institute (KARI) is collaborating with the Ministry of Agriculture, NGO's, and women's groups to encourage the production, testing, dissemination, and adoption of tissue-cultured banana plantlets. The project was launched in 1996, with funding from the Rockefeller Foundation and the International Development Research Centre of Canada (IDRC). It brings together the Institute of Tropical and Subtropical Crops (ITSC) and other entities in South Africa with those in Kenya, receives diagnostics from the John Innes Centre (JIC UK), collaborates on germplasm testing with Uganda, and delivers clean banana plantlets to small-scale farmers. In fact, the first few thousand plantlets are already growing in the fields of resource-poor farmers.

When Mrs. Mburu wants to grow more bananas, she follows a time-honored method. She simply uproots a sucker growing alongside one of her existing banana trees, then replants it in the desired spot. In time the sucker will grow to become a 'mother tree' in its own right, flanked by its own suckers.

Used by millions of small-scale farmers all over Africa, Mburu's method carries no cash costs and requires little labor. It does, however, have significant drawbacks. The sucker carries with it all the diseases and pests afflicting the mother plant, and these are passed on to the new tree. Without the introduction of fresh planting material, the quality and vigor of the trees decline with each generation. The method is also desperately slow—traditionally propagated trees produce only six suckers a year.

Mburu's farm is near Maragua, in the Kenyan highlands, an area once famed for the sweetness of its bananas. Like most Kenyan smallholders, she devotes little labor and few inputs to her crop. Throughout the Marauga area most banana trees now look sickly and poorly cared for. In recent years, pests and diseases such as nematodes, fusarium wilt, banana weevil, and black sigatoka have invaded the orchards, while fruit yields have fallen to an all-time low. The result has been a steep hike in prices, which have increased several fold in local markets over the past five years.

Across from Mburu's farm is a different kind of enterprise. Here Joe Kibe, former Permanent Secretary at the Ministry of Agriculture and currently a large-scale farmer of French beans for export, has just had four hectares of his land planted with 6000 tissue-cultured banana plantlets.

A large bunch of bananas grown from tissue culture.

Tissue-cultured plantlets have four main advantages over traditionally propagated planting material. First, they are clean: the sterile conditions under which tissue culture is carried out eliminate fungal diseases, nematodes, and bacteria. Second, the trees will be far more productive, reaching maturity earlier and bearing fruit bunches up to 50% heavier than traditionally raised trees. Elsewhere, tissue-cultured trees typically produce 50 tonnes of fruit per hectare per year, and could produce up to 80 tonnes per hectare per year under Kenya's favorable climate conditions. Third, the trees are more uniform and will all reach maturity at the same time. Finally, each tree produces up to 1015 suckers per year—which is more than double the number from traditionally propagated trees—thus offering a rapid means of multiplying and disseminating better planting material.

Kibe obtained his plantlets from a new company, Genetic Technology Limited (GTL), which produced them in its laboratories in Nairobi. Now the plantlets, each of uniform height, occupy individual holes dug in neat rows across a large, well-cultivated field. Soon, irrigation facilities will be in place, ensuring that the young trees get all the water they need. Each tree will also receive liberal doses of farmyard manure or fertilizers. As they mature, the plantlets will be watched closely to make sure that the number of off-types—unwanted variations produced through cell division in the laboratory— remains within acceptable limits. If all goes well, Kibe will harvest his first banana crop in early 1998, selling it to local wholesalers in Nairobi.

For Kibe, banana is a new crop—and not one he would have thought of growing if left to his own devices. In fact, when Florence Wambugu, director of ISAAA's AfnCenter, first met him, he was thinking of diversifying into roses—already a lucrative export for several of his neighbors. Wambugu had come to consult him on how to reach Kenya's small-scale farmers with tissue-cultured banana plantlets. His advice was simple and pragmatic: allow a few farmers to demonstrate the value of the plantlets, and others would soon follow. When Wambugu went on to suggest that he himself should be the first of the few, he was initially skeptical. But at ISAAA's instigation he and his wife visited South Africa. There they saw for themselves how commercial production and a lucrative export industry could be built on the large-scale production of tissue-cultured plantlets. Kibe has since become Kenya's first commercial farmer to take the crop seriously And he's blazing a trail Wambugu hopes others will soon follow.

"Kibe's success in producing and marketing the crop will build confidence throughout the sector," Wambugu points out. She believes that his example, together with that of other pioneering farmers, will alert small-scale farmers to the commercial potential of bananas and ignite the demand for tissue-cultured plantlets.

Reaching the small-scale farmers

The potential demand for tissue-cultured plantlets in Kenya is astronomical—conservatively estimated at around four to eight million per year. Only a fraction of this demand is met at present. "it's a chicken-and-egg situation," observes Wambugu. "The private sector hesitates because it faces the challenge of developing effective distribution channels to reach millions of resource-poor farmers widely scattered over large areas of the country. Farmers don't demand tissue-cultured plants until they know about them and have seen for themselves the benefits they bring."

Experience in countries such as South Africa and Costa Rica shows that new companies can be set up to produce and commercialize tissue-cultured banana plantlets. In South Africa, the private sector currently produces over 4 million tissue-cultured plantlets per year, mainly for export. Public sector research by the Institute of Tropical and Subtropical Crops (ITSC) played an important role in supporting the development of the technology, which was then taken over by the companies. Critical to success are strict quality control in the laboratory, sound nursery management, and strong links with end users, which provide vital feedback on farmers' reactions to the new technology.

In Kenya, the recent emergence of companies such as GTL suggests that the country can replicate South Africa's experience. GTL was established in 1994, primarily to step up the supply of planting materials for pyrethrum, an important export crop. Its success in this area has led the company to diversify into sugar cane and other crops, including banana. .Wambugu, whose encouragement was instrumental in getting the company established, is confident its operations will continue to expand. "Every time I go there, they have new labs," she affirms. To stimulate the efforts of GTL and other current and potential players in the market for tissue-cultured banana plants, the ISAAA project plans to buy plantlets during the early years of operations. The plantlets will be supplied to small-scale farmers for on-farm testing.

Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (IKUAT) first demonstrated that a domestic market for tissue-cultured plantlets existed in Kenya; the school pioneered the use of tissue culture in Kenya during the early 1990s. The university's laboratory currently produces around 20,000 plantlets a year, which are sold to farmers in nearby banana growing areas. Farmers from these areas regularly come to the university to ask for more material, and there is now a waiting list of more than 1 year.

Two Biotechnology Fellowships (one sponsored by the Agricultural Biotechnology Support Program (ABSP) and the other by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC)) awarded through ISAAA enabled researchers at the university to visit private-sector companies in Costa Rica, Mexico, and South Africa in order to learn how to upscale production. The researchers are now working independently to prepare the laboratory for expanded operations.

The role of the public sector

As in South Africa, the support of the public sector will be vital to the development of a strong private sector. KARI is the main public-sector partner in the ISAAA-brokered project. One of KARl's most important contributions is germplasm. Under the project, a sourcing team at KARI is building the Institute's germplasm collection and organizing the selection and testing of improved materials. Sources of the new materials include Kenya itself, where around 35 varieties are grown, and neighboring Uganda, which harbors even greater genetic diversity. Improved materials are also being acquired from international centers and programs, such as the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) and the International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain (INIBAP).

Another vital form of public-sector support is virus indexing. The tissue culture process does not eliminate viruses, which cause several serious diseases in bananas. One of the most serious is bunchy top—a disease not yet present in Kenya and which the project must take care not to import. Virus indexing—a technique for detecting and eliminating viral infections in cells—eliminates all viruses (except those, such as banana streak virus, that are thought to be embedded in the plant genome). The use of this technique avoids the risk of multiplying infected plant stocks through tissue culture.

Under the project, ISAAA is organizing training in diagnostic techniques at the John Innes Centre (JIC) in the UK and at ITSC in South Africa. With funding from the UK's Overseas Development Administration (ODA), a laboratory is currently being installed at KARI that will offer disease diagnostic services both to the project and to the private sector. In the longer term, the laboratory could be privatized to offer a comprehensive service to all banana producers.

The production of "clean" banana plantlets.  
 

For tissue-culture, the hearts or shoots of banana plants are cleared and placed on petri dishes where the cells continue to divide and grow, forming a callus.

Tissue-cultured calli are divided several times (sub-cultured) to produce up to 2000 plantlets from one mother plant.

Before being transplanted to a nursery, the tissue-cultured material grows shoots and roots on special nutritive media.

The tissue-cultured plants are acclimatized in a shaded nursery before being transplanted in farmers' fields.

KARI will also conduct on-farm research to stimulate demand for tissue-cultured plantlets among resource-poor farmers. Around 150 farmers recognized as leaders in their communities have been selected to participate. They will pass the new technology on to others in their communities. They will also be encouraged to start new businesses as regional or local distributors. That should, in turn, encourage larger, more centralized suppliers such as GTL. By working at both ends of the supply and demand problem, the project seeks to overcome the chicken-and-egg situation described by Wambugu.

The on-farm component of the project will include agronomic research to determine the optimum management of improved tissue-cultured plantlets under Kenyan conditions. This research will address issues such as the most advantageous plantlet density and planting depth, the expected productive life of plantations, water and fertilizer requirements, and recommended disease control strategies. An important question to be answered is the extent to which farmers may revert to traditional propagation methods after the initial influx of new planting material. It may be that farmers need buy only a few tissue-cultured plantlets, using the many suckers they produce to raise yields throughout their plantation.

Lastly, on-farm research will provide vital information on farmer's reactions to the new technology, including their willingness to pay for it. This in turn will throw light on the feasibility of supplying plantlets to the more remote areas, given the high transportation costs. The information will feed into the development of a business plan to make the large-scale production of tissue-cultured plants commercially viable.

Complementing KARl's on-farm research will be socioeconomic studies conducted by Kenyatta University in three of the major banana-growing provinces of Kenya. These studies are being funded separately by IDRC and other donors under the African Technology Policy Studies (ATPS) network. Margaret Karembu, a lecturer at the university's Department of Environmental Studies, is responsible for the research. Karembu's studies are still at an early stage, but she has already reached one important conclusion that vindicates the approach taken by the ISAAA project: technology diffusion must be accompanied by information or training if small-scale farmers are to benefit from tissue-cultured plantlets.

Spreading the message

To secure the advantages of tissue-cultured trees, farmers must break with tradition and manage their orchards. For a start, hole planting—an optional extra in the traditional system—is obligatory with tissue-cultured trees, whose vigorous suckering lifts the whole tree during the early years of growth. The plantlet must be planted in a hole so that soil can be added to prevent the growing tree from uprooting itself. To avoid pest and disease problems, especially nematodes, farmers should clean their fields before planting, preferably choosing an area in which banana has not been recently cultivated. Once the plantlets are in, they need manure—an input that is seldom provided in the traditional system. If rains are unreliable or insufficient they may also need water, the supply of which is critical during the first three months until the bulbs have formed. Lastly, farmers must also learn that they cannot propagate trees from suckers indefinitely, but must once again order fresh planting material after 8-12 years. Thus, if they are to be successfully introduced, tissue-cultured planting materials require changes in farmers' attitudes and practices. The role of public-sector research and extension services in getting the message across will be particularly important.

KARl's on-farm trials will serve to demonstrate appropriate management practices in the target areas. In addition, the extension service of the Ministry of Agriculture has agreed to participate in the dissemination of planting material and information. The project also involves several non-governmental organizations (NGOs), including local women's groups that are keen to promote solutions to the problems of small-scale banana growers.

An industry in the making 

Banana prices in Kenya are rising, and farmers are waking up to the crop's commercial potential. That makes them hungry for the influx of new planting materials that tissue culture can offer. This demand from farmers increases the chances that ISAAA's project will succeed in creating a strong distribution system and an effective private sector. Provided that the adoption of tissue-cultured plantlets is accompanied by adequate information and training, there is no reason why demand should not remain buoyant for many years to come.

As the new materials reach farmers' fields, they should bring about a rapid improvement in domestic food supplies. They will also raise living standards and increase employment opportunities for small-scale farmers or entrepreneurs. In the long term they may even make it possible for Kenya to export bananas.

Standing to gain the most from the project are many millions of women like Mrs. Mburu, who depend on bananas for their livelihoods. Mburu is well aware of her neighbor's experiment and has been to see it for herself. If all goes according to plan, it won’t be long before her tired old orchards get a new lease of life.