Banana industry of Pakistan: opportunities and challenges

The banana is a major cash crop in the southeast of Pakistan cultivated over an area of 32,000 ha. Feeding its population of 200 million, it has great potential of export to its neighboring countries especially Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia, and the northern part of China. With the development of CPEC, these opportunities have increased manifold and more importantly, Pakistan will be able to share the production technology of this fruit. The banana industry of Pakistan has been operating at very low productivity and yield (about 7 times less) as compared to other regional countries such as India where the average yield from 2000 to 2013 was about 32.9 t ha^‑1 and in China 29 t ha^‑1. This low yield obtained in Pakistan was because of many factors including re-planting of infected suckers and unavailability of healthy disease-free suckers, poor crop management, lack of skills, and postharvest losses. The efforts were initiated to resolve these issues through the introduction of new banana cultivars to replace single banana cultivar (‘Basrai’). These banana cultivars were acquired from China and the International Banana Germplasm Repository Belgium. After multiplication through tissue culture and adaptability trials, four cultivars namely ‘Grand Naine’, ‘William Hybrid’, ‘Brazilian’, and ‘Pisang’ were recommended for commercial cultivation. Initially, plants of these cultivars were produced through in vitro techniques by the public sector and distributed among farmers free of cost or at subsidized rates. Training of farmers, extension workers, and representatives of NGOs was conducted for the handling of tissue culture materials and field plantation. Keeping in view the demand for healthy banana plants, some private tissue culture labs has initiated this activity and in the future will be able not only to meet local demand but also export to neighboring countries if required. In the future, the major challenge of this industry is to maintain the phytosanitary conditions of banana fields and the implementation of global standards to harvest the maximum benefits of the banana industry through export to regional countries and efforts have been initiated to meet the challenge.