The Pakistan Oilseed Development Board (PODB) is launching a post-Eid holidays drive soon to mobilise farmers in Waziristan to grow olive plants for their economic uplift and activity generation for those getting back to their native places from internally displaced people camps.
The board is paying special attention to promote four oil bearing crops in all the agencies in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa province to help start the economic activities aimed at poverty alleviation. These four crops are soyabean, canola, sunflower and olive. "As IDPS are getting back to their native places, the board has planned to help them in settling by mobilising them to plant these four crops for income generation. As September is considered the best season for olive plantation in these areas, the board will start with this high value crop," PODP Managing Director Syed Nasir Ali told the Business Recorder on Monday.
He said his board officials had a meeting with the Federally Administered Tribal Areas additional chief secretary in Ramazan and it was decided to promote sowing of oil bearing crops in all the agencies. "For this purpose, the board will extend incentives to farmers who will agree to participate in this activity. We will provide them subsidised seeds, free of cost hybrid plants and also impart technical know-how to the intending farmers," he added.
He further said, "The board will be offering a very comprehensive "end-to-end" package to the intending olive planters. It will include courses for value addition, avoiding pre-harvest and post-harvest losses, marketing of their crop and also will give potable extraction units to extract oil from olive they will be producing." About the financial side of this project, he said the Fata administration will bear the financial aspect of this project. "The efforts at promoting olive in the Khyber Pakhtunkhawa are not new but the board launched a study with the help of the Italian government in 2009 for potential areas of Pakistan. That study had identified 880,000 hectares of wasteland in the country as suitable for the olive plantation, situated in 14 districts of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and Balochistan.
"Out of this total identified area 444,574 hectares of land is situated in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa," he added. He said, "If we could be able to use this land for olive cultivation, it will increase the income of the farmers, help eradicating poverty, saving precious foreign exchange being spend on import of edible for the country."
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