‘NAROBAN 6’ (‘NARITA 17’): A Conventionally Bred ‘Matooke’ Hybrid for East African Banana Consumers

Abstract

Cooking bananas (matooke) are an important staple crop in Uganda with an annual per capita consumption of 250 to 400 kg, which is the highest in the world (International Network for the Improvement of Banana and Plantain 2001). Despite the importance of matooke in Uganda, the current productivity is less than 30% of the potential of 60 to 70 t·ha 1·yr 1 (Tushemereirwe 2001). This is largely attributed to declining soil fertility, drought, lack of high-yielding cultivars, scarcity of clean planting materials, and pests and diseases. Farmers manage some of these constraints through cultural methods, and many are effective at keeping pest and disease pressures below threshold levels. However, the use of host plant resistance is the most effective and durable option for the management of the banana constraints. Genetic improvement of bananas in Uganda was initiated by the National Agricultural Research Organization (NARO) and International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) in the early 1990s using medium-term and long-term breeding strategies. With the medium-term strategy, banana hybrids were introduced in Uganda from international breeding programs such as Fundación Hondureña de Investigacíon Agrícola and International Network for the Improvement of Bananas and Plantain (now Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT) and evaluated to determine the agro- nomic performance, pest and disease resistance, and consumer acceptability. Introduced cultivars were then released as KABANAs 1 to 5. Although these cultivars were high-yielding, resistant to pests and diseases, especially Fusarium wilt and black Sigatoka, they did not fully meet consumer requirements. Consequently, NARO and IITA focused on improving triploid East African highland bananas for yield, disease resistance, and pest resistance. These East African highland bananas were evaluated for male and female fertility, which resulted in the identification of female-fertile clones (Batte et al. 2019; Ssebuliba et al. 2005). These were crossed with a wild diploid (‘Calcutta 4’) to generate synthetic tetraploids with matooke attributes in their background. The synthetic tetraploids were further crossed with improved diploids to generate secondary triploid hybrids that were evaluated to determine agronomic, disease, and pest resistance (Pillay et al. 2004). The products of these efforts are at various levels of development and evaluation. Some of the products of the early crosses were ‘KABANA 6H’ and ‘KABANA 7H’, which were both released in Uganda in 2010 (Nowakunda et al. 2015), ‘KABANA 6H’, which was released in Tanzania in 2022 as ‘TARIBAN4’ (Madalla et al. 2022), and ‘NAROBAN 1’, ‘NAROBAN 2’, ‘NAROBAN 3’, and ‘NARO- BAN 4’, which were released in Uganda in 2017 (Tumuhimbise et al. 2018). However, ‘NAR- OBAN 5’ was released in Uganda in 2018 (Tumuhimbise et al. 2019), and ‘NAROBAN 6’ was released in 2025. The objective of this work was to report the development and evaluation process of ‘NAROBAN 6’ and traits considered for its release to the banana farming community in Uganda.