A new project, co-led by Dr Renata Retkute from the Department of Plant Sciences’ Epidemiology and Modelling group, aims to safeguard banana and plantain production in East and West Africa by reducing crop losses caused by banana bunchy top virus (BBTV).
The research will provide key insights to help reduce the spread of BBTV, one of Africa’s most devastating crop diseases.
Banana and plantain production is crucial for food security and rural livelihoods in East and West Africa.
However, the spread of BBTV is causing significant yield losses and economic hardship.
In a research collaboration with the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, Dr Retkute will map the movement of banana planting material between smallholders in the region.
The findings will support the development of sustainable banana and plantain production, ensuring food security and economic stability for smallholder farmers.
The project, ‘Investigating smallholder banana planting material movement in East and West Africa’, is funded by the Mastercard Foundation and University of Cambridge Climate Resilience and Sustainability Research Fund.
“I’m really excited about this opportunity. It brings together everything I care about – science that’s grounded in real-world impact, improving livelihoods for smallholder farmers, and working on solutions that are scalable and sustainable,” Dr Retkute said.
“With support from the Mastercard Foundation, I’ll be able to build on my work using remote sensing and disease modelling to help detect and manage crop diseases early.”
“It’s a chance to collaborate with amazing partners, reach more people on the ground, and help strengthen climate-resilient food systems across Africa,” she said.
Preventing a deadly disease
BBTV is currently the most destructive banana disease in Africa, where it is spreading more rapidly in the past decade than at any time in the last half century.
The disease massively reduces fruit production. It also threatens commercial and smallholder ‘seed’ production as well as farmer landrace cultivars – varieties than have naturally adapted to the region over time – used for planting material.
BBTV is transmitted by the banana aphid (Pentalonia nigronervosa) and through the exchange of infected planting material.
Currently the main strategy for managing the disease relies on the production and use of virus-free planting material, also known as ‘clean seed’.
Dr Retkute explains: “Sharing of planting material is the main route for disease movement over long distances. Knowing the nature of connections between donors and recipients of planting material – who shares with whom and when – would enable National Plant Protection Organisations to identify strategies to prevent the spread of the disease if there was an outbreak.”
“Knowing more about the exchange network for planting material would also allow for early detection of the disease to support containment. This is as opposed to the current situation, where disease is detected only when crop production begins to fail, often years after the initial infection.”
“Decision support tools like the mapping we are working on, are also important for promoting and supporting regional trade in the continent and for supporting a coordinated effort for seed health in Africa.”
An international collaboration
The project, which focuses on Benin, and Ghana in West Africa and Rwanda in East Africa, is a collaboration with Dr Aman Bonaventure Omondi, Agricultural Scientists at the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT.
Dr Bonaventure is currently based in Rwanda and working across multiple countries in East and West Africa.
He said “I have worked on innovative ways of understanding disease spread, for example by using drones to map landscape-scale weak points for the spread and control of BBTV, and the use of mobile phone applications for disease detection and reporting.”
“These activities come from lessons learnt about the importance of landscape-scale control having implemented farm and neighbourhood scale control approaches especially in Burundi and Malawi.”
In Rwanda, while major banana-growing regions in the east remain unaffected by BBTV, the southern and southwestern areas near the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda have reported cases.
This highlights the need to understand clean seed networks, grower seed provisioning, and cropping behaviour to develop effective disease management strategies.
There are no reported cases of BBTV in Ghana so far. However, there is a strong cultural tradition of bringing banana suckers from neighbouring Togo and Benin, both of which have reported BBTV. This shows how important it is to integrate ‘clean seed distribution’ into spatially explicit model of BBTV spread in Ghana.
The project will identify geographic regions in Ghana that are at the highest risk of BBTV introduction and spread due to cross-border transmission. This will enable targeted surveillance, early intervention strategies, and policy recommendations to reduce the threat of BBTV to Ghana’s banana and plantain production.
About the funding
The Mastercard Foundation and University of Cambridge Climate Resilience and Sustainability Research Fund aims to catalyse new and strengthen existing collaborations between researchers in Africa and Cambridge and support high quality training activities.
Awards are made to pairs of researchers from the University of Cambridge and African institutions looking to establish or strengthen research collaborations that address key challenges in climate resilience and sustainability.
It is anticipated that many awardees will be able to use the preliminary results from their research catalyst grant to apply for and win significant funding from other funding bodies.
Image: Banana seed enterprise in Rwanda. Photo credit: Dr Aman Bonaventure Omondi.