Rony Swennen, devoted his entire career of over 40 years, to the improvement of banana and plantain, focussing on smallholders in Africa.
In the 1980s he set up at the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) the plantain breeding program and the best plantain hybrid called PITA 3 was released in Ivory Coast in 2016 where it covers about 10% of the local market. Other countries that test plantain hybrids were Nigeria, Cameroon, D R Congo, Burkina Faso and Mali. He collected worldwide banana and plantain varieties in the 1980s that laid the basis of the world banana collection now called the International Banana Transit Centre, under auspicien of the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT.
Since 2013 he leads (again) the banana breeding at IITA. He built the plantain and matooke banana breeding pipelines, including multilocational and on farm evaluation.
Under his leadership high yielding and resistant cooking bananas are tested in DR Congo, Burundi, Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania, with best hybrids released in Uganda in 2025 and Tanzania in 2021. They are called NARITA as this was jointly developed by NARO (Ugandan national program) and IITA.
He chairs the East African banana breeding network. The released hybrids are multiplied both by seed companies and public institutions. He has changed the course of banana and plantain breeding, from a status that breeding is nearly impossible to full breeding pipelines, where releases are now happening at regular intervals.
He was professor in tropical agriculture for 35 years at KULeuven university, Belgium. He supervised more than 70 PhDs, with about 50% coming from tropical Africa.
He received 6 international awards and a chieftancy in Nigeria and Royal title in Uganda because of his impact with banana. He has + 341 peer reviewed articles (including PNAS, Nature Food.
