By Steve Chauluka, contributor:
As the country is still recovering from the Banana Bunchy Top Virus (BBTV) disease that wiped out 70 percent of bananas in the country and crippled cultivation of the same in 2016, there is a glimmer of hope following the banana macro propagation initiative jointly implemented by the Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources (Luanar) and PlantVillage.
It is being implemented at Luanar’s horticulture farm.
The initiative aims to revive banana farming by multiplying and supplying clean, disease-free suckers for farmers to plant.
This will also contribute to the restoration of livelihoods of 200,000 families whose lives depended on banana farming before the BBTV outbreak.
Currently, Malawi imports 20,000 metric tonnes (mt) of bananas from Tanzania and Mozambique every week to satisfy the growing demand of the commodity in the country, according to Abel Sefasi, a molecular biology and bio-technology senior lecturer at Luanar.
Sefasi is leading the project.
“This was not the case 40 years ago when we had a lot of bananas in Thyolo, Mulanje, Nkhata Bay, Nkhotakota and Chitipa; we used to have our own bananas of different varieties.
“However, the emergence of the Banana Bunchy Top Virus, coupled with relaxed field management by farmers, compounded with the fact that banana is a perennial crop, brought about soil fertility issues that led to a significant decline in banana production,” Sefasi said.
Although the government previously imported suckers from France and South Africa and supported micropropagation through tissue culture—a laboratory-based technique for multiplying suckers— these efforts fell short due to high costs and limited impact.
“We found that macro propagation, which is not a new technique as it is practiced elsewhere, is something we can explore and use to solve this problem by ourselves. We can do so by developing our capacity here and by training our farmers and developing their capacity to multiply and share their own banana planting materials in their communities. The process is simple as it largely uses locally available materials.
“We, at Luanar, designed structures for banana multiplication and found that sawdust can be used to plant banana corms and produce suckers,” Sefasi said.
PlantVillage field officer, who is working on the project, Eluby Kawelama, said banana macro-propagation was in line with the Malawi Digital Plant Health Services Project, a government of Malawi project for which the organisation is one of the implementing partners.
“Banana is one of the priority crops we are looking into. We want to multiply clean and healthy suckers, which we will take to farmers in the affected areas. At the end of the day, the farmers are going to get clean seeds, which is a guarantee to them that they will have a clean harvest”, Kawelama said.
By the end of this year, the initiative aims to reach 50 percent of the demand in the four districts of the country out of the 20,000 sackers the initiative is expected to produce.
So far, 5,500 sackers have been produced and delivered to farmers.
In addition to banana propagation, PlantVillage has launched a cassava seed multiplication project on 2.4 hectares in Longa and Mphonde extension planning areas (EPAs) in Nkhotakota as well as Thekerani EPA in Thyolo District.
These fields have been approved for seed multiplication.
With financial support from Norad, PlantVillage is also developing a digital platform to detect pests and diseases early and provide timely advisories to farmers, aiming to boost crop productivity across the country.
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