24 March 2009

From its offices in France and Costa Rica, Bioversity has begun implementing a 3-year project focusing on Musa grown with coffee in Costa Rica, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Peru. Funded by the German Organization for Technical Cooperation (GTZ), the project involves the collaboration of 20 institutions, including CATIE, CABI, CIRAD, Promecafe, INCAE and INIA.

Bananas and plantains are often grown with other perennial crops, such as coffee and cacao. These diversified systems tend to be less productive than full-sun intensive monocrops, but offer other benefits, including ecological and economic resilience, food security, low labour costs, dietary diversity and environmental services.

The project, Improving small farm production and marketing of bananas under trees: Resource partitioning, living soils, cultivar choice and marketing strategies, aims to sustainably improve the productivity and marketing of Musa grown under trees by using advanced research tools and innovative participatory approaches. It will first identify pilot zones for adding values to the agro-forestry bananas, then extrapolate results from these zones to other zones as a poverty reduction strategy.

Scientists will also examine inter-relationships and influences of water, light and soil health on Musa productivity within mixed species perennial cropping systems. The findings will be then integrated with existing biophysical models to help design and manage mixed crop canopies and plant arrangements for further research, on-farm testing and training. As a result of this work, grower groups and collaborating scientists should be better equiped to pilot the production and marketing of higher value Musa as a component of their farm enterprise.