Tissue culture in banana plants getting popular

SURAT: After taking banana farmers across the country by storm, tissue-culturing of banana plants, a biotechnology initiative to increase the yield by five times of traditional farming, is becoming popular among farmers in Oman, Middle East, Pakistan, Sri Lanka and Africa.

Recently, agro-technology major Jain Irrigation Systems exported the first consignment of its Grand-Nain variety of tissue-cultured banana plants to Oman. It plans to further export around 66,000 plants by the end of this year. Sources said farmers in the Middle East and other countries cultivate the traditional variety of banana which gives very low yield all over central Asia.

Since the market potential for bananas is very high in the Middle East countries, the demand is met through exports from the Philippines, India and South American countries. “Farmers in foreign countries are looking at increasing the banana yield. However, they are switching over to tissue culture farming,” said Jain Irrigation Systems vice-chairman Ashok Jain.

In India, farmers in banana growing states like Gujarat, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Chhattisgarh, Uttar Pradesh, Manipur, Nagaland, Assam, Punjab and Orissa have been cultivating tissue-cultured banana from the last few years.

Banana is a globally important fruit crop with 97.5 MT of production. The annual production of banana across the country is 17 MT from 4.9 lakh hectares land. The area under cultivation for tissue-cultured banana would be around 40-50%.

The annual yield for traditional banana farming using drip irrigation technology was 65 tonne per hectare. The use of tissue culture technology, however, has further enhanced this yield to 95-100 tonne per hectare. Moreover, the traditional banana plants bloom in 16-18 months while the tissue-cultured plants bloom in only 11 months.

“The tissue-culture technology is getting overwhelming response from the farming community in the country and abroad,” said Mr Jain. According to Mr Jain, the company has augmented its capacity to 1 crore tissue culture plants per annum and it is looking forward to expand the capacity following growing demand in the countries abroad.

Mr Jain said, “We are looking forward to export tissue-cultured banana plants to Pakistan, Africa and Sri Lanka in the next few months.”