An evaluation of impact and challenges of tissue culture banana technology in Kenya

Abstract

Tissue culture technology was developed, and disseminated to farmers with active participation of actors along the value chain. However, the potential benefits of the technology are yet to be achieved. This is attributed to diverse challenges that have not been addressed. This study was designed to contribute to this information gap. Primary farm household and trader data were collected through a survey carried out in 2012. Multistage sampling approach was used to select counties, sub-counties, wards, markets, and finally survey units (households and banana traders). The survey targeted all banana farmers and traders in the study regions. After establishing a sample frame in villages (households) and markets (traders) semi-structured questionnaires were used to collect the data on personal characteristics, banana production, consumption and marketing. Double Hurdle model was utilized to analyse factors influencing farmers’ uptake of TC banana technology; Nested logit model was used to assess factors influencing farmer knowledge, attitude and preferences to TC banana (TCB) technology; Propensity score matching was used to investigate the extent to which TCB technology has impacted on farmers’ welfare and Tobit model was utilized to assess the determinants of banana traders’ intensity of participation in the fruit markets. Descriptive statistics was used to describe the data sets. The results showed that though TCB technology adoption has increased over the years since initiation in late 1990s, the TCB adoption of TCB was about 30%. The highly adopted cultivar was TCB grand naine (18.9%) followed by TCB ng’ombe (11.7%) and the least adopted was solio (0.8%) and Gold finger (0.3%). The low adoption is due to limited access to planting material, lack of marketing, high transportation costs due its bulkiness and stakeholder perceptions. The PSM results showed that the impact of TCB technology on TCB adopters compared to non-adopters, was significant on banana production levels (Kernel p ≤ 0.05; radius p ≤ 0.05; NN p ≤ 0.05, Stratified p ≤ 0.05), income generation (Kernel p ≤ 0.05; Radius p ≤ 0.05, NN p ≤ 0.05) and banana consumption (Stratified p ≤ 0.05). The results suggest that institutional support structure like establishment of banana processing factory, opening up new TCB laboratories and developing local banana cultivars into tissue culture products, would lead to improved adoption of TCB. Therefore, intensification of the investment on TCB technology dissemination is a key policy instrument to raise incomes and reduce poverty among banana farming household, although complementary measures are needed.