Xanthomonas Wilt resistant Banana
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Bananas showing early stages of wilt disease
photos: Wageningen University banana research project
http://bananaresearch.org
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Healthy bananas
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Banana is the world's most widely consumed fruit, with a global trade worth more than 12 billion. It is threatened by diseases for which there are no effective conventional treatments. But biotechnology has provided solutions.
Bananas and plantains are staple crops central to the diet of many in tropical Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and the number one imported fruit in many countries in temperate latitudes. Breeding improved varieties has been difficult due to the physiology of the plants which often reproduce vegetatively. Many widely planted and commercial varieties are clones, which increases their vulnerability to disease outbreaks.
In the East African highlands of Uganda and Kenya smallholders depend on local varieties known as matoke, which are severely threatened by bacterial wilt (Xanthomonas campestris). Researchers have used genetic engineering to overcome some of the breeding challenges to produce a promising disease resistant variety now being field trialled (Fighting Banana Bacterial Wilt in Uganda; Field trials move Kenya closer to GMO bananas). This has been stridently opposed by parties driven by unfounded fear mongering at the behest of "green" European NGOs (How European-based NGOs block crop biotechnology adoption in Africa; Suppressing Growth: How GMO Opposition Hurts Developing Nations; Starved for Science: How Biotechnology Is Being Kept Out of Africa).
The promise of biotechnology based solutions and their importance to smallholders in Africa is explored in an excellent recent documentary (see Feast on Facts: Food Evolution; Food Evolution). With the passage of a biosafety law by Uganda's Parliament on 4 October, 2017, the country now has a legal basis to review and approve biotech improved crops (Uganda parliament finally passes biotech law).
A fungal disease known as black sigatoka, or black leaf streak, threatens the bananas that are grown commercially to meet a global trade worth $12.4 billion in 2015 (Banana facts). Biotechnology based approaches offer numerous opportunities to address this and other disease and production issues in bananas (Banana breeding and biotechnology) though they have, once again, been delayed by opposition rooted in well fed European countries (Bananapocalypse: The race to save the world's most popular fruit).
Bananas have also been explored as a vaccine delivery mechanism that would not require a cold chain. But technical difficulties and ideologically driven opposition have dimmed the once promising prospects (A Needle or a Banana: Whatever Happened to "Edible Vaccines,"?).
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