Solution to Vanuatu drought-related food shortages

Transcript

The Vanuatu Agriculture Research Center says it has a solution to the drought-related food shortages being caused by an El Nino event in the country.

The centre's Vincent Lebot says it has come up with about 50 improved varieties of sweet potatoes that can be cultivated during the dry season and in poor soil condition.

Dr Lebot says the varieties will allow farmers to yield 20 to 30 tonnes of tweet potatoes per hectare in just three to four months.

VINCENT LEBOT:  Part of the solution is to plant improved varieties of root crops that can produce  high yield, reasonably high yield with very low inputs.  That means no fertiliser and no pesticides on a fairly depleted soil, a fairly poor soil, because in Vanuatu we observe that the length of is now reduced because of the increase population pressure.  Basically we are generating genetically improved varieties of sweet potato.  Why sweet potato?  Because they are, compared to other root crops, they are fairly drought tolerant and they have a very short cycle.  In 120 days, that's four months, you can have an average yield of two to three KG per plant.  So that is approximately 20 to 30 tonnes per hectare.  These hybrids are generated using conventional breeding techniques.  They are not genetically modified organisms,  they are just normal hybrids, in other words we are conducting crosses.

HILAIRE BULE:  This is your garden.  Tell us more about your garden.

VL:  This is an experiment where we are basically evaluating hybrids that were generated a few years ago with the Catholic mission and we are planting them on the very heavy clay soil and we are planting them here at the bay on the alluvial plain which is a very sandy, alluvial soil.  The problem here is that this soil has been cultivated since the opening of the agricultural school in 1962 and it's fairly depleted.  Anyway we can get two to three KG per plant so these hybrids you can say they are fairly resilient because you can see how healthy are the plants and they were planted without irrigation, no fertilisers, no nothing.  We are trying to evaluate the hybrids in local conditions just like what householders around Port Vila would do if they planted sweet potatoes.  We already ranked these hybrids.  We already know which ones are the best and we are going to propagate the cuttings and distribute the cuttings to farmers so they can have access to improved planting material.