PESHAWAR: The Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP) Government, Higher Education Commission and National Research Programme for Universities (NRPU) initiated a project titled “Commercialization of High Quality Rapeseed Variety Hasnain-2013” for Enhancing oil-seed Productivity is being executed in the province. The principle investigator in the project manager Dr Habib Ahmad Vice Chancellor Islamia College University inaugurated the ceremony on Saturday here in Peshawar. He said that the project was basically designed to provide high quality certified Rapeseed seed to the farmers, which is the limiting factor in the present agriculture system of the country and added that the main objectives of the project are to procure process and market 150 tons certified Rapeseed seed during project three years (2015-18). The project is further aimed to focus on multiplication of certified seed of improved commercial variety of Hasnain 2013 which will further motivate the private sector in seed business particularly in local seed production and will involve and encourage local extraction industry in the procurement process. Dr Habib Ahmad claimed that under the project activities underway in full swing in the province and 80 acres of crop of early generation (Pre-Basic) is sown in different area of KP during last September- October to achieve the target of year first 50 tons of seed procurement. “The cultivar is highest yielding across Pakistan in the seven test sites in National Uniformity Rapeseed Yield Trial and still have the potential to outperform and further stated that the cultivar is significantly early maturity and have the distinctiveness of wave leaf margin, light green color, early maturity, pod shape is curved silliqua, black seed color, high yielding and resistant to prevailing diseases and insect pest attack,” he added. Dr Habib said that the domestic edible oil production does not meet the need of the country and the total availability of edible oils in 2014-15 was 2.335 million tons and added that the local production stood at 0.546 million tons, which accounted for 23.38 per cent of the total availability while the remaining 76.6 percent was made available through imports at the cost of Rs 139.344 billion. It’s pertinent to mentioned here that edible oil stood at the top in the import of food group while stood second after petroleum group in the total import. In order to save the foreign exchange, the government has encouraged the cultivation of edible oil-seed crops in the country and under this project of the KP government traditional or conventional oil-seed crops are rapeseed/mustard, sesame and ground nut, while non-traditional oil-seed crops are sunflower, soybean and safflower. Among these crops, rapeseed/mustard and sunflower have assumed special position in the agriculture economy of Pakistan and much of the research efforts have been directed towards the improvement of these oil-seed crops.