FAO has been helping the Jamaican Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries to produce disease-free ginger using a low-tech biotechnology called tissue culture. Ginger rhizome rot (GRR) is a highly destructive disease which has been devastating production in Jamaica. With FAO’s help, a long-term strategy to resuscitate the industry has been developed, including introduction of a commercial certification programme. As part of this, quality certified clean planting material, free from the GRR disease, is produced using tissue culture in the greenhouse that can then be purchased by farmers for cultivation. Tissue culture is a long-established biotechnology that refers to the in vitro culture of plant cells, tissues or organs in a nutrient medium under sterile conditions. See an FAO story about this project at http://www.fao.org/fao-stories/article/en/c/1318751/ (in Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish) or contact [email protected] for more information.

14/03/2021