Malaysia used to be among the top three pineapple producers in the world in the 1960's and early 1970's. Although the country is no lonegr one of the biggest exporters today, new initiatives are being looked at to boost this industry, for example, through the adoption of biotechnology. One company that has been exploring this new technology is Asma Agro (M) Sdh Bhd. Izwan Ismail find out more.

PINEAPPLE farmers now have more options on the types of pineapple they can grow and produce. The top breed in the industry is called MD2 or Nanas Dinar, a hybrid pineapple, which becomes the standard for the international market because of its colour, flavour, shape, life span and ripeness, superior to other varieties.

Today, the MD2 breed has been enhanced with the use of biotechnology and the enhanced breed is said to offer farmers better quality pineapple and increased production.

According to Asma Agro’s director, commercial, Naqab Bajuria, tissue culture technology has been used to produce the new MD2 pineapple varieties which can help farmers overcome some of the common problems in pineapple plantation.

Tissue culture is a process that involves exposing plant tissue to a specific regimen of nutrients, hormones, and light under sterile, in vitro conditions to produce many new plants, each a clone of the original mother plant, over a very short period of time.

“We find that tissue cultured plantlets are the most suitable planting material in pineapple cultivation because they are not contaminated and resistant to mealy bugs, nematodes, wilt disease, and heart and root rot,” he says.

Benefits. Naqab says the MD2 pineapple produced from the tissue cultured technology offers farmers a number of advantages; from the size and taste of the fruit to the income they can get from this variety.

The MD2 pineapple has high sugar content and is yellowish in skin colour when it ripens. It always grows in uniform size, which gives medium to large (1.3kg to 2.5kg) cylindrical and with square-shouldered fruit with large flat eyes. The pulp is also said to be sweeter, has four times more vitamin C and contains less fibre. It also has spineless leaves and greener than most varieties.

Naqab says due to its quality, the MD2 pineapple can fetch up to RM10 to RM12 per fruit compared to RM2.50 per fruit for ordinary pineapple.

“Furthermore, the pineapple ripens faster that is by the twelve month, it can be plucked compared to 20 months for other varieties,” he says, adding that this would allow the farmers to grow more fruits in a shorter period.

The MD2 pineapple doesn’t use conventional vegetative propagation using the crown and suckers. “Instead, the pineapple is propagated using micro propagation, which is a type of tissue culture technology to regenerate millions of pineapple plantlets from cuttings of slips rather than propagating from seeds,” says Naqab.

“This method would solve the farmers’ problem of lack of seeds to be planted,” he says.

He says since the MD2 pineapple is produced via the tissue culture method, each acre of land can be planted with up to 30,000 pineapple suckers from the conventional 14,000 trees, helping farmers to produce high-yield crop in shorter period of time.

According to Malaysia Pineapple Industry Board, currently, Malaysia produces 264,000 metric tone pineapples a year and the country aim to increase this number to 404,000 by 2010.

Besides being able to be planted in higher number and have shorter maturity timeframe, the MD2 pineapple has shelf life after harvest. “Instead of just 21 days for the normal varieties, it has 30 days of shelf life and able to survive in cold storage for up to two weeks,” says Naqab.

Commercialisation. The MD2 pineapple plantlets are expected to be commercially available in March 2008. “We are making arrangement with the Agriculture Ministry on the ways the plantlets can be made available to the farmers,” says Naqab.

Currently, the tissue culture process of the MD2 pineapple is being done at Asma Agro’s laboratory incubator at UTM-MTDC Incubation Centre in Johor Bahru and Gunung Panti, Kota Tinggi.

“We hope, with the availability of the tissue culture technology, the country can promote and move into high-value agricultural activities and large-scale commercial farming,” says Naqab.