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| Braving poor roads in search of plantains. |
The 18 accessions are among the 49 so far collected in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRCongo) by Benoit Dhed’a Djailo and his team from the University of Kisangani. The collecting missions and establishment of the specimens in the university’s field collection, as well as the transfer to the ITC, are funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation as part of a project on conserving the diversity of African bananas.
DRCongo is believed to host Africa’s largest diversity of plantains, with an estimated 100 varieties. Although bananas (defined in the broad sense to include plantains) originate from Asia, the ancestors of plantains were probably brought to Africa more than 2000 years ago. Their nurture and selection by farmers has led to West and Central Africa being regarded as a secondary centre of plantain diversity, with little overlap between the two regions.
However, whereas West African plantains have become increasingly well known over the last 20 years, those in Congo were last studied in the 1950s, when Prof Edmond De Langhe, the world’s foremost expert on bananas, worked at the Yangambi Research Station, not far from Kisangani. The research station has since been abandoned, while political unrest and security concerns have precluded scientists from exploring the region’s diversity until late in 2005.
The plantains now being transferred to the ITC were collected in 2005 and 2006 from farms around the Kisangani area. Most accessions were rare in the villages visited and some have never been described before. The most interesting ones have economic potential, produce many suckers or are easy to harvest because of their short stature. From Belgium, duplicates of the new accessions will be sent on to Cameroon, where these useful traits will be brought into the breeding programme of the Centre africain de recherches sur bananiers et plantains.
In addition to upgrading the Kisangani field collection—in the hope that it will eventually rival, if not surpass, Yangambi’s collection in its heyday—a tissue culture lab is being built to facilitate the distribution of the accessions throughout the region.
The project is not only part of a strategy to improve the livelihoods of resource-poor farmers, it is also a major contribution to Bioversity’s efforts to develop a comprehensive strategy for the conservation of banana diversity, both for Africa and globally.
For more information contact Nicolas Roux at
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