Panniyur-6 and Panniyur-7 - high yielding black pepper selections for Kerala

Abstract

Black pepper is one of the important foreign exchequer of spices produced and exported from India. Ninety six percent of the area under cultivation and production of black pepper is from Kerala. But the productivity in our country is very low owing to the lack of high yielding superior varieties. Clonal selection, selection from open pollinated progenies and exploitation of hybrid vigour are practiced in black pepper to locate superior genotypes. A clonal material collected from the farmer's field of Taliparamba Taluk of Kannur district of Kerala was identified as outstanding in all the attributes based on the yield performance. This identified accession No. PRS 22, a type of Karimunda, designated as Karimunda III was evaluated and compared for yield performance with that of existing high yielding cultivars and varieties and released as Panniyur-6 in 2000 for cultivation in all black pepper growing tracts of Kerala (Table 1). Panniyur-6 (accession PRS 22) recorded the maximum green berry yield in four years from 1994-95 to 1998-99. This shows that the genotype Panniyur-6 is stable in mean green berry yield irrespective of the years and seasons.