Ugandan banana farmers’ battle against a plant disease that has been destroying 30 percent of their crop each year could soon be over, thanks to genetically modified technology from Taiwan.
Academia Sinica, the nation’s top research institution, said in a press release yesterday that it has helped Ugandan farmers find a solution to a devastating bacterial disease called banana xanthomonas wilt (BXW) by using the latest gene technology.
The disease, which originated in Ethiopia, was detected in Uganda in 2001 and has since spread into neighboring countries such as the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Rwanda and Tanzania, taking a serious toll on local farmers’ livelihoods.
Conventional methods of saving banana crops from BXW, such as selective breeding of resistant strains, were attempted, but proved to be ineffective in tackling the disease.
In 2006, the African Agricultural Technology Foundation, a nonprofit organization that helps smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa access agricultural technologies, licensed the gene modification technology from Academia Sinica to address the problem.
The institution said in a press release that genes isolated from a sweet pepper plant that effectively warded off BXW in Taiwan in 2001 were used to create bananas with wilt-resistant genes.
The new banana variety has now entered the confined field trial testing stage in Uganda and the results have been promising, Ugandan agricultural scientists were cited as saying in the press release.
Genetically modified crops remain illegal in Uganda, however, and it may take more than just science to popularize genetically modified bananas in the African country.
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