Black Sigatoka tolerant bananas harvested in Dominica

By Michelle Nurse On May 2, 2016

The new varieties on display on Friday morning (Photo via Dominica News Online)

The Caribbean Agricultural Research and Development Institute (CARDI), in collaboration with the Ministry of Agriculture, has successfully harvested in Dominica types of banana and plantain, which are tolerant to the Black Sigatoka disease.

CARDI Research Assistant, Gregory Linton, noted that the crops—referred to as ‘FHIA’— unlike the local Cavendish, do not allow Black Sigatoka to progress past its second stage of development.

The first harvest of FHIA bananas in Dominica, dubbed by the numbers one, three , 18, and 23 were publicly sampled here on Friday.

“What we have noticed on our FHIA bananas — on basically all of them — is that you don’t have the later stages being developed. So, like the stage three, four, five, they generally don’t develop,” Linton told DNO on Friday morning. “So, that’s why we prefer to call them tolerant instead of resistant because they will be infected by the disease, they will be affected, but the disease, its cycle cannot progress because of the nature of the plant.”