Bananas are an essential part of the Ugandan's diet. 70% of the population eats bananas every day. Recently, however, the production of this fruit has had an alarming drop due to the BBW bacterium. The infection has become a serious problem for Uganda, which has tackled it in a very sensible way: it has asked its scientists to look for a solution.
The advantage of sexual reproduction is that it randomly mixes the characteristics of the father and mother plants so each offspring is different and can resist different diseases. Therefore, when a bacterium attacks plants that reproduce sexually, it usually only affects a part of the crop as there are many others that are immune to it.
But bananas do not reproduce sexually and very few bananas have seeds. A study in Uganda showed that there was only one seed obtained in every fourteen tons of bananas. As a result, most bananas have identical genetic information and, therefore, if a bacterium attacks one, it attacks all the bananas. That is the current problem in Uganda. The low genetic variety makes the fight against the BBW bacteria extremely difficult. The solution found by Uganda was to talk with its scientists so that they could develop a genetically engineered banana that resists the bacteria. The laboratory that created it, Agro-Genetic Technologies, Inc., is one hundred percent Ugandan and has nothing to do with any multinational. In the laboratory, through tissue culture techniques, they were able to manufacture seedlings of bananas that are resistant to the bacteria, which they can now offer to producers. The tissue culture technique consists of developing the plant from a cell, without the need for a seed. That is, they eliminate the need for sexuality. Of course, to get genetic variety you have to do genetic interventions in the laboratory.
Now the crops must be approved by the parliament and anti-transgenic Western NGOs, which, as is expected, are against this variety and are campaigning against it.
Source: diariovasco.com