The Navuso Agricultural Technical Institute (NATI) received the first lot of 500 tissue cultured banana planting materials from the Ministry of Agriculture and the Taiwan Technical Mission (TTM) on Thursday, a move targeted at reviving Fiji’s banana market and establishing a commercial orchard.
The banana seedlings were produced using the tissue culture technique at the Centre of Agricultural Technology Transfer (CATT) laboratory in Nausori — a collaboration between the ministry and TTM.
Director Crop Research at the ministry Dr Shalendra Prasad said Fiji was once very prominent in banana export in the 1950s-60s before it ‘got out of business’ in the early 70s because of cyclones and diseases.
“We have seen the prevalence of a lot of diseases and the quality of banana coming into the market is not good, so the ministry started this project with TTM and established a commercial tissue lab to produce tissue culture planting materials,” Mr Prasad said.
“Tissue culture planting materials are usually clean which is free from diseases, and this is the first lot that has come out of the tissue culture lab.
“We need to work on this commodity and revive our banana crop.”
The demonstration plot at Navuso will begin with one hectare of commercial banana using tissue cultured materials.
TTM senior specialist Pascal Kuo said they used the Veimama banana variety tissue in this first lot of seedlings.
“We find this variety gives good fruit and good production and we use tissue culture in our lab to multiply the planting materials,” Mr Kuo said.
He said they would increase the production of banana planting materials for Navuso through tissue culture.
