Banana improvement project meets to celebrate the first new cooking Banana varieties in Tanzania

Arusha, Tanzania, 23 May 2022. After a two-year lockdown, an international team of banana researchers convenes for a three-day workshop in Arusha to continue forging a path to speed up the breeding process and deliver new bananas to East African farmers. Together with the Hon. Hussein Bashe, Tanzanian Minister of Agriculture, the project partners will also celebrate the release in Tanzania of the first new, high-yielding cooking banana varieties produced by CGIAR’s International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in collaboration with Tanzania Agricultural Research Institute (TARI) and partners.

The “Accelerated Breeding of Better Bananas” (ABBB) project (http://breedingbetterbananas.org/) led by IITA aims to deliver improved, disease-resistant, high-yielding cooking banana varieties to farmers across the region. The project team is working on speeding up the breeding cycle of bananas to deliver new varieties to farmers faster. They are especially interested in providing pest- and disease-resistant varieties that farmers and consumers will like.

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