A Queensland University of Technology project is aiming to tackle nutritional deficiencies in East Africa. Enriched with vitamin A, the so-called super-bananas could start being mass-produced in Uganda as early as 2020.
First results were promising, with the bananas being tested at a university lab in Brisbane and field tests in far north Queensland. The researchers tested hundreds of different permutations in Australia before taking the most promising genes to Uganda.
The project will now move forward with a three-year phase of field trials in several locations across Uganda, and concurrent six-week long human independent human trials in the US.
The deficiency can lead to an impaired immune system and negatively impact brain development, a situation that the orange-flesh coloured bananas will hopefully change. Some 650,000 to 700,000 children in the world die of vitamin A deficiency every year.
The university’s goal is to eventually distribute the plants free of charge to Ugandan farmers and, once legislation on the mass-production of the GM bananas is ratified, use the technology to enrich crops throughout East Africa, including in Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania.
James Dale, the project’s lead scientist, said: “Good science can make a massive difference here by enriching staple crops such as Ugandan bananas with pro-vitamin A and providing poor and subsistence-farming populations with nutritionally rewarding food. The Highland or East African cooking banana, which is chopped and steamed, has low levels of micronutrients particularly pro-vitamin A and iron. We are aiming to increase the level of pro-vitamin A to a minimum of 20 micrograms per gram dry weight in order to significantly improve the health status of African banana consumers.”
