Biotechnology for Improving Food Security in Rwanda

Abstract

About 200 Million people in the world suffer from hunger. The United Nations (2007) estimates that the world population will reach 8.1 Billion people by 2030. Meeting global food requirements will necessitate increasing food production by 50%. The most attractive strategy to meet this challenge is to increase smallholder agricultural productivity. This strategy will not only increase food supply, it will also increase smallholder incomes, reduce malnutrition and improve livelihoods of the poor. Biotechnology has the potential to increase the world's food output and reduce food insecurity. Plant biotechnology offers a wide scope of possibilities for increasing productivity, diversification and development of a more sustainable agriculture. This technology includes biopesticide production, plant tissue culture techniques, and the use of advanced molecular biology techniques for plant transformation, genomic analysis coupled with breeding and plant disease diagnoses. Agricultural biotechnology will contribute to food security through technologies that improve yield and quality and can easily be adopted by small scale farmers. The technology should, therefore, be simple, low cost and have little risk to humans and the environment. Tissue culture offers such kind of technology. This communication discusses the status of tissue culture research In Rwanda and how modern biotechnology has led to increased productivity and food security in some developing countries.

Plant biotechnology: A key tool to improve crop production in Rwanda

“…The use of a hoe and other traditional agriculture methods has served the Rwandan Agriculture Industry for a long time, but these means prove to be time-consuming, frustrating and limiting the production capacity of the people (Gahakwa et al, 2012). This conventional practice of agriculture has not changed in quite a long time now due to the lack of trained workforce, difficulties in getting an agricultural credit, academic research results that do not reach the people.…”

“…Plant biotechnology and genetic engineering are the primary drive of agriculture progress in developed countries (Huang et al, 2002). Despite the difficulties in sharing information between scientists across the country, the information gathered about the current status of plant biotechnology in Rwanda from some researchers in Rwanda Agriculture Board (RAB) have reported the use of tissue culture: in vitro cultivation of cash crops like banana, coffee, potato, sweet potato, pineapple, passion fruit, Tamarillo also known as a tree tomato (Gahakwa et al, 2012). Several private companies (FAIM.CO) have also initiated in vitro production of crops including bananas.…”

“…The effort made still does not provide enough for the high demand of plantlets from the farmers. Disseminating resistant varieties produced using plant breeding technology is highly recommended since most of the varieties that are brought from abroad sometimes fail to adapt (Gahakwa et al, 2012). More research is needed to identify and use suitable domestic breeding techniques for popular varieties in the country, and this should be widespread to other crops since the only crops receiving research attention are common beans, bananas, cassava and sweet potatoes (Karangwa, 2018).…”

“…Most African countries including Rwanda have significantly prioritized and allocated funding to the agriculture industry to increase food productivity. In Rwanda, current agricultural policies advocate crop intensification and production of high valued crops and the use of biotechnology in animal production (Gahakwa et al, 2012).…”

“…Rwandan government policies on agriculture have always been prioritized because agriculture is the maindrive of economic growth and employing more than 87% of the population in 2017 (FAO, IFAD, UNICEF, 2017). Despite the efforts made in the past years, agriculture has faced challenging problems mainly shortage and inconsistent rainfall, soil infertility, soil salinity, lack of land management, urban development, abrupt climate change which causes erosion in some parts of the country because of Rwanda's mountainous landscape (Brink et al, 1998;Gahakwa et al, 2012;Mikova, 2015). All these challenges have negatively impacted agriculture performance causing low food production as well as low exportation.…”