Research work is being conducted by the Ministry of Agriculture and Waterways to try and open up Fiji’s banana export market to New Zealand and other neighbouring countries.
Banana as an export commodity was prominent in the 1950s-60s but went ‘out of business’ in the early 70s because of cyclones and diseases.
Dr Shalendra Prasad, the director Crop Research at the ministry, said they were now working to revive this crop while at the same time ensuring they were now producing cleaner and disease-free seedlings.
He said banana was sold in the domestic market, but research work was being held in the background to reopen the export market.
“Currently, we are not exporting banana. From then (70s) until now, there has been no export of banana. We have export pathways to New Zealand for vudi (plantain), but we don’t have the approved pathway to export banana to New Zealand,” Dr Prasad told this newspaper.
“So there is some research work and some trade facilitation work that needs to be done so that we can open up this market and start again.”
Part of that strategy is the production of clean and disease-free planting materials via tissue culture.
Last week, Navuso Agricultural Technical Institute (NATI) received the first lot of 500 tissue cultured banana planting materials from the Agriculture Ministry and the Taiwan Technical Mission (TTM).
The banana seedlings —to be planted on a one-hectare demonstration farm in Navuso — were produced using the tissue culture technique at the Centre of Agricultural Technology Transfer (CATT)
laboratory in Nausori, manned by TTM specialists.
