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At Nutrition-sensitive landscapes, a CIFOR and ICRAF organized side-event at the Conference on Forests for Food Security and Nutrition, Bioversity International's researcher Céline Termote spoke about putting people at the centre of the landscapes approach: "Food is an expression of their culture, we must not forget that," she said. Photo: CIFOR
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Award for banana research
Kwesi Atta-Krah, Deputy Director General of Bioversity International, receives the cooperation award.
The United Nations’ annual Global South-South Development Expo last week recognized a project implemented by Bioversity and KULeuven University in Belgium with a Cooperation Excellence Award. The project worked to transfer disease-resistant banana varieties from Honduras, where they were developed, to the Kagera district of Tanzania, where they were sorely needed. The project increased income from bananas six-fold from 2003 to 2008 and had an impact across the entire region.
Bananas are an important staple crop in east Africa, but in recent decades their productivity has declined as a result of pests, such as nematode worms and weevils, and diseases such as Panama disease and black Sigatoka. Drought is a further threat. Starting in 1997, and supported by the Belgium Development Cooperation, Bioversity and local partners began distributing improved banana varieties to farmers through the Kagera Community Development Programme, where more than a million people depend on bananas.
Among the varieties distributed were some developed by the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture, one local variety from DR Congo, and several new varieties developed by Fundación Hondureña de Investigación Agrícola (FHIA). The transfer of material was planned and executed by KULeuven University and facilitated by Bioversity and the International Transit Centre for bananas, which is maintained at KULeuven in Belgium.
Farmers had received more than a million banana plants by 2002, and two subsequent impact studies showed clear benefits. The farmers rapidly adopted the new varieties and spread them to villages that were not among the project sites. Income from bananas increased both in total (from USD103 in 2003 to USD 623 in 2008) and as a percentage of total household income, from 27% to 47%.
Poverty declined too, with many more families above the poverty line in 2008 than in 2003.
Kwesi Atta Krah, Deputy Director General of Bioversity, who accepted the award on behalf of all the partners, pointed out that this specific project was just one in a wider web of development collaborations involving countries in West and East Africa with other Southern countries facilitated by Bioversity and with support from donor countries in the North.
“It has been a complete success,” he said, “with FHIA 17, one of the varieties from Honduras, almost replacing Gros Michel, previously the most popular commercial banana variety in some markets.” Panama disease had previously wiped out most commercial plantations of Gros Michel.
 | Bioversity International is a member of the CGIAR consortium |
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This work by Bioversity International is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License. |
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