Volunteer Assistance Spurs Banana Revival in Malawi
Pests and disease threaten crops in every country around the world, and Malawi is no different. Since the mid-1990s, smallholder farmers in the southeast African country have seen banana bunchy top virus (BBTV) wreak havoc on their plantations. According to the Malawian Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security, almost 70 percent — more than 30,000 hectares — of Malawi’s total banana production area has been lost due to the disease, which is transmitted unknowingly through infected banana suckers — shoots from the plants’ roots that are used for new plantings.
Hortinet Foods Limited is a farming business owned by Frankie Washoni in Lilongwe, Malawi. While Washoni’s 17-acre farm includes 10 acres of various fruits and vegetables, the outstanding feature of his farm is the 6,000 virus-free banana plants he tends on the other seven acres.
In 2018, Washoni set out to establish the first private tissue culture laboratory in Malawi, investing $55,000 to construct a lab and purchase the necessary equipment. “[Accessing] banana seed remains a big problem, and we saw an opportunity to bridge the gap and eventually slow down the banana imports into the country,” noted Washoni. “We decided to invest in tissue culture technology to mass produce good-quality and disease-free planting material.”
As the physical facility took shape, Washoni turned to CNFA’s Malawi Farmer-to-Farmer program to request a volunteer expert in tissue culture laboratory operations and management and acquire detailed knowledge on how to produce disease-free planting material. Dr. John Griffis, Professor of Horticultural Sciences at Florida Gulf Coast University, arrived in August 2019 to assist Hortinet in setting up the new lab. During the assignment, he ensured that Hortinet had all the necessary equipment and designed a layout to facilitate efficient operations. He also trained seven up-and-coming lab technicians — four young men and three young women — in areas such as biosafety and risk mitigation.
Griffis returned to the Hortinet facility in December 2019 for a follow-up assignment to establish standard operating procedures and protocols for lab operations, and to train the team in how to initiate the trial cultures that would pave the way for larger production.
Eight months after Griffis’s second visit, Hortinet had already produced 40,000 banana plantlets, which were supplied to local banana farmers through the Malawi Government’s Agriculture Sector Wide Approach — Support Project. Other plantlets were sold to 600 contracted smallholder farmers, who will grow them and become outgrowers of mature bananas to Hortinet. The next batch of 100,000 banana plantlets will be sold to an additional 900 contracted smallholder banana farmers and to commercial banana farmers.
Washoni noted that “Dr. Griffis equipped us with skills and protocols we could not get from our own research.”
Based on the success resulting from the two Farmer-to-Farmer engagements, Hortinet has invested in additional equipment that will allow it to triple its production capacity — forecasted to reach one million banana plantlets a year at full capacity. Thanks to Washoni’s entrepreneurial enthusiasm and CNFA’s Farmer-to-Farmer facilitation, the future looks bright for Malawi’s banana producers.
