BAU Germ Plasm Centre develops 48 fruit varieties

The Germ Plasm Centre of Bangladesh Agricultural University (BAU) has been playing a significant role in the country’s fruit sector by developing new varieties of delicious fruits.
The centre has so far developed 48 varieties of fruits including local and foreign varieties while many small and marginal farmers have brought their fortunes by cultivating those varieties, said the officials of the centre.
They said a team of 40 fruit scientists and students led by Prof MA Rahim have been working actively to develop new varieties of fruits since 1990 under the financial support of Swiss Agency for Development and Coordination.
The new varieties include mango, guava, strawberry, fig, lemon and plum. All the varieties have been registered under the Ministry of Agriculture from 2006 to 2010.
There is a huge demand of local varieties of fruits in and outside the country, said Prof Rahim, head of the team.
Prof Rahim said that the centre has so far sold five lakh saplings to around 35,000 farmers of different areas in the country.
The professor said 4,500 germ plasm samples have so far been collected from 43 countries to develop different varieties of fruits. “Now we are conducting research on 100 fruit varieties,” he added.
He said the new varieties of fruits have also created scopes for many educated and illiterate youths to become self-reliant.
Since 1999, the centre has also trained some 25,000 farmers on fruit cultivation, post harvest, nursery management and Integrated Pest Management (IPM). But the allocation from the BAU for doing research work at the center is very inadequate, the officials at the centre said.
“Only Tk 3 lakh is allocated annually for research. The centre needs more manpower to gear up its activities,” they added.

Courtesy of The Daily Star