IITA, Exchange VZW, and HORTINET collaborate on banana clean seed production toward import reduction in Malawi

8 September 2023

With an estimated annual consumption of 453,000 metric tons, bananas are important to Malawi. Therefore, the local production of planting material is crucial, especially since the advent of Banana Bunchy Top Virus and black Sigatoka. However, there is only one commercial tissue culture lab (HORTINET), with currently insufficient production levels.

Banana plantation at Hortinet Foods Limited.
Banana plantation at Hortinet Foods Limited.

IITA provides technical support to Hortinet Foods Limited, Malawi, on tissue culture banana seedling production within the framework of a collaborative agreement between IITA and EXCHANGE VZW established in June 2022. Hortinet aspires to scale banana production and reduce the large quantities imported from neighboring Tanzania and Mozambique.

The banana bunchy top virus and poor agronomic practices have severely impacted banana production in Malawi, resulting in over 80% loss and underscoring the need for disease-free planting material to revive production. To address this need, Hortinet owner Frankie Washoni established a commercial tissue culture lab about 23 km off Lilongwe to produce disease-free planting material for growers. Virus-free banana plants imported from Vitropic, France, were used for field establishment, and the plantation currently serves a mother garden where suckers are obtained for further multiplication through tissue culture.

Frankie and Delphine at Hortinet tissue culture laboratory growth room filled with banana cultures.
Frankie and Delphine at Hortinet tissue culture laboratory growth room filled with banana cultures.

However, Hortinet laboratory faced challenges of high levels of contamination, low multiplication rates, and sub-optimal capacity use compounded by a lack of technical expertise in banana seedling production and reached out to Exchange for support. Exchange supports promising African entrepreneurs with tailor-made expertise in their growth and scale-up. Exchange Coach Jan Aertsen, in response to Hortinet’s request, contacted IITA Banana Breeder Rony Swennen and brokered a consultancy agreement with IITA for technical support to Hortinet.

Through this agreement, IITA Tissue Culture Expert Delphine Amah has been working with Hortinet since August 2022, deploying her expertise on banana tissue culture for clean seed production.

During the first mission to Hortinet’s laboratory, she conducted a thorough diagnostic survey, identified the key issues with production, and proposed a plan for capacity development and a combination of remote and physical backstopping to address the production bottlenecks. Following this, Washoni and his lab manager, Nancy Chidzalo, attended a hands-on training on banana tissue culture at the IITA Bioscience Tissue culture laboratory in Ibadan, Nigeria.

Frankie shows pre-hardened and fully hardened banana plants in Hortinet screenhouse.
Frankie shows pre-hardened and fully hardened banana plants in Hortinet screenhouse.

As Washoni and the team are very committed and open to learning, significant changes were observed with better plant establishment and multiplication right after the first diagnostic mission and further refined after the hands-on training. On a recent backstopping mission to Hortinet in August 2023, one year after the first mission, Amah discovered that the lab is now in high production with enough stocks set to deliver over 15,000 plantlets to farmers by Q1 of 2024.

“We are happy we got support from IITA through Delphine, and we are now confident that we will continue to improve our production and provide clean planting material to smallholder farmers who grow bananas in the wetlands in Malawi,” Washoni said. He also confirmed that they are confident with post-flask management of tissue culture plantlets with very high success rates at the pre- and fully-acclimatized stages.

Capacity building for private sector tissue culture labs is crucial to strengthen skills on banana seed production and address the inherent demand for clean seed imposed by climate challenges and scale productive varieties to smallholder farmers. “Tissue culture is a technology-intensive process, and I am passionate about training young tissue culture lab managers to scale this technology in Africa,” noted Amah, who also provides similar technical support to other public and private sector tissue culture labs in Africa through other projects – PROSSIVA. Functional commercial tissue culture laboratories are game-changers in the vegetatively-propagated crop seed systems landscape with huge potential for sustainable high quality seed delivery to African smallholder farmers who rely on these crops.

Contributed by Delphi Amah