Planting of Over 300,000 Olive Trees Underway in Pothohar, Pakistan

Under a five-year plan ini­ti­ated in 2015, the agri­cul­ture depart­ment of Pakistan’s Punjab province is pro­vid­ing two mil­lion olive saplings free of charge to farm­ers in the Pothohar region. The aim of the Olive Valley Project is to develop the region as an olive-grow­ing region and pro­mote domes­tic olive oil pro­duc­tion.

Pothohar (also often spelled Potohar, Pothwar, Potwar) is a large plateau region in north-east­ern Pakistan cov­er­ing an area of 8,592 square miles. It has been iden­ti­fied as suit­able for olive pro­duc­tion because of its favor­able cli­mate and ideal topog­ra­phy. The pro­posed plant­ing area cov­ers an area of 15,100 acres, where 2,038,500 olive saplings will even­tu­ally be planted under the five-year project run­ning until 2020.

The Barani Agriculture Research Institute (BARI) located in Punjab’s Chakwal dis­trict, Pakistan has already planted 337,500 olive trees in the region so far this year, while 48,600 were planted last year. The BARI web­site reveals that the mas­sive Olive Valley Project is not only pro­vid­ing olive saplings to local farm­ers, but also tech­ni­cal sup­port on olive grove man­age­ment and finan­cial sup­port for water resource devel­op­ment and drip irri­ga­tion.

The long-term objec­tives of the project are to pro­duce olive oil for export while cre­at­ing a sus­tain­able olive oil econ­omy which will also ben­e­fit the rural com­mu­ni­ties of the region. Pakistan presently pro­duces 34 per­cent of the edi­ble oils it con­sumes domes­ti­cally and is forced to spend sig­nif­i­cant for­eign exchange on the import of edi­ble oil to meet domes­tic demand.

In order to meet this demand, the Punjab gov­ern­ment is also work­ing on increas­ing the pro­duc­tion of sun­flower oil. Meanwhile, the export of high-qual­ity olive oil could gen­er­ate sig­nif­i­cant for­eign exchange earn­ings. The five-year Olive Valley Project is expected to gen­er­ate rev­enue of 858 mil­lion Pakistani Rupees ($8.2 mil­lion) in its ninth year, and a cumu­la­tive rev­enue of 39.1 bil­lion Pakistani Rupees ($373.7 mil­lion) over a 25-year period.

• The Express Tribune


• Barani Agriculture Research Institute Chakwal


• Business Recorder