The Philippines' Department of Agriculture issued a press release on the export of GCTCV-219 bananas to Japan by farmers whose farm had been decimated by tropical race 4 (TR4), the fungal strain that causes Fusarium wilt in Cavendish bananas. The cultivar is a selection of GCTCV-119 which the Taiwan Banana Research Institute (TBRI) had shared with the Philippines in 2002. TBRI had developed GCTCV-119 by planting on a large scale tissue-culture plantlets of the local Giant Cavendish cultivar in TR4-infested fields and selecting the most promising surviving plants, hence the name GCTCV for Giant Cavendish tissue-culture variant. GCTCV-219 was similarly obtained through recurrent selection of GCTCV-119 plants in Davao's TR4-infested fields.
After field trials showed that only a small percentage of GCTCV-219 plants developed Fusarium wilt, the cultivar was introduced to 20 banana growers as part of a Bioversity International-led project supported by the Department of Agriculture's Bureau of Agricultural Research. The harvest and ripening protocols were also optimized to help the cultivar gain acceptance in the Japanese market.
The Department of Agriculture also announced that plantlets of GCTCV-219 have been multiplied by the Bureau of Plant Industry research centre in Davao and are ready for distribution to the region's smallholder farmers.