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Systems for Cultivar Deployment and Clean Seed Multiplication |
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Cultivar choice is one of the first decisions that growers face – both to reduce pest problems, and to diversify their market options.
Access to high-quality, pest- and disease-free planting material of a range of varieties should provide the universal starting point for responding to disease outbreaks and upgrading banana production systems. In practice, however, few developing countries have fully functional clean seed systems for vegetatively propagated crops, including banana. Even where elements of such a system, including tissue culture laboratories and nurseries, already exist, their reliability is compromised by lack of quality control and the risk of virus contamination.
Through a series of pilot projects in Latin America, Africa and Asia, Bioversity’s banana research will seek to understand the problems, generate any missing technologies (such as appropriate virus diagnostics) and build capacity, based on experiences of best practices in successful enterprises and projects. Results will be encapsulated in guidelines for national sectors to use in strengthening banana clean seed systems and cultivar deployment strategies. These will include: appropriate diagnostic tools; approaches for stakeholder participatory planning, monitoring and evaluation; alternative models for formal and informal systems, based on available resources, and taking into account the prevalent pest and disease problems present; as well as quality control, certification and other regulatory issues.
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What we do 