Bananas are unusual among major crops in that most of the types grown, either for export or local consumption, are farmer-selected varieties rather than improved hybrids produced by breeding programmes. This situation reflects not only the difficulty of breeding bananas, but also a lack of appreciation by funding agencies of its importance as a staple crop. Indeed, until the late 1970s there were only two major banana breeding programmes, in Honduras and Jamaica, both of which focused on improving the export banana.
The Jamaican programme has since ceased to exist, whereas the United Fruit Company donated its banana breeding programme to the Honduran government in 1984. The following year, one of our first actions as the newly-created International Network for the Improvement of Bananas and Plantains was to channel financial support to the Fundación Hondureña de Investigación Agrícola (FHIA), which was soon able to release disease-resistant hybrids. Many of these hybrids, along with other institutes' improved varieties, have been evaluated by scientists as part of the International Musa Testing Programme, and by farmers as part of Bioversity-led projects.
Although public-sector support to FHIA ended in 2004, Bioversity continues to assist breeding through ProMusa, the Global Programme for Musa Improvement. The programme’s working groups provide support to breeding by stimulating interactions among specialists and focusing them on developing a coherent research-for-development agenda that encompasses sustainable plant production and plant protection.
Through its support to the Global Musa Genomics Consortium, Bioversity also assists in the provision of genetic markers: easily detected DNA sequences located near genes that are hard to observe. In marker-assisted selection, breeders use the presence of markers to identify parents that have a high probability of possessing genes of interest.
| Institutes with a banana breeding programme |
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CARBAP: Centre Africain de Recherches sur Bananiers et Plantains; CIRAD: Centre de coopération internationale en recherche agronomique pour le développement; EMBRAPA: Empresa Brasiliera de Pesquisa Agropecuaria; IITA: International Institute of Tropical Agriculture; INIVIT: Instituto de Investigaciones en Viandas Tropicales; NRCB: National Research Centre on Banana; TNAU: Tamil Nadu Agricultural University
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