The Department of Agriculture (DA) Biotechnology Program said it aims to distribute 7,000 to 10,000 “drought-resistant” saba banana plantlets to farmers to help them cope with the impact of climate change.
In a news statement, the DA Biotech Program said its “mass production of drought-tolerant saba project” is a response to the challenges raised by climate change to Filipino banana farmers.
The DA Biotech Program noted that they aim to “build a strong, resilient, and sustainable agriculture and fishery sector to withstand adverse effects of climate change through the use of biotechnology.”
The project, the program added, is also in line with the DA’s “Plant, Plant, Plant” program that was kick-started at the start of the pandemic to help farmers increase their output and earn more profit.
“While multinational companies can provide quality planting materials for contracted farmers, many smallholders do not have access to quality planting materials,” it said.
“Thus, through this project, the program aims to increase production of quality planting materials of saba banana through the utilization of mass propagation technologies and protocols,” it added.
The DA Biotech Program said the project is being spearheaded by the Institute of Crops Sciences (ICropS) and the Institute of Plant Breeding (IPB) of the College of Agriculture and Food Sciences (CAFS), University of the Philippines Los Baños (UPLB).
“This particular project will provide farmers with 7,000-10,000 saba plantlets produced through ‘meristem’ culture [or generally known as tissue culture],” it said.
“This ‘drought-tolerant’ plantlet, or that which can grow and survive in agricultural fields and other planting areas with limited water supply in an extended period of time, will then be examined to produce seedlings free of viruses that commonly infect bananas,” it added.
Citing Doctors Pablito Magdalita and Fe dela Cueva, who are leading the project, the DA Biotech program said they “expect to increase the production of quality saba planting materials nationwide by 90 percent to 98 percent.”
The DA Biotech Program said through the DA Regional Field Offices in Regions 3, 4A and 4B that the drought-tolerant, virus-free, tissue-cultured plantlets will be further multiplied into suckers that can be distributed for planting by farmers and growers in drought-prone areas and typhoon-hit areas.
The materials could also be a means to the livelihood of the families under the “Balik-Probinsya” Program of the government, it added.
“Despite the devastating impacts of calamities which was further magnified by the emergence of the global health crisis, indeed biotech tools can be seen as a ray of hope for the banana industry sector to ensure availability, accessibility, and affordability of this widely consumed fruit,” it said.
1 comment
To Mr. Jasper Arcalas
We are a seedling company based in Mindanao. We are quite interested in the saba banana plantlets mentioned in your article dated November 23, 2020.
We plan to set up a saba banana production project to produce raw material for a processing plant that would produce and export processed saba and cardava banana products.
I’m sure you are well aware that the problem of processing plants for saba and cardava products is the lack of raw material and the unstable supply of saba and cardava bananas. This is because these are produced in small farms and and is a backyard industry.
We wish to stabilize the supply for the processing plant we shall put up by producing our saba and cardava raw material requirement.
This brings us to the problem of planting materials of saba and cardava. The problem of planting material supply is addressed in the article you just wrote. Pelase send us the name of the persons that will produce the plantlets and their contact numbers and email addresses. We would like to learn from them how this is done and how we they can transfer the technology to us so we can mass produce the saba and cardava seedlings at our nursery that we can plant to produce the saba and cardava raw material we need.
. I hope you can put me in contact with them so we can start communicating with each other and get things moving.
Roberto Sison, Chief Operating Officer Palmera resources, Inc.