Rather, he said, “We look forward to the times when Pakistan would be among leading olive-producing and exporting countries in the world”.
While talking to APP, Project Coordinator, CIHEAM Bari International Olive Culture, Marco Marchetti said that there was a need to work more on the olive supply chain in Pakistan, the lack of which at present could not reap the benefits in Pakistan.
He said that consumption of edible oil in Pakistan is 4.5m tons for which the market needs to introduce the best olive oil for human health.
Marco Marchetti said that for the promotion of olive oil culture in Pakistan, there was a need to introduce the technology, including awareness to the farmers.
He said that there was a need to reduce the cost of production in the olive supply value chain with the acquisition of technology, by improving the cost of production, local farmers can be given opportunities to sell olive oil in the market at a good price.
“Olive culture has been around for thousands of years in Italy, where we have been associated with Mediterranean civilization, where olives have been cultivated for thousands of years,” he said. He said that organizations and institutions related to local agriculture in Pakistan should pay special attention to the promotion of olives.
He said that qualified human resources, technical assistance, quality and safety standards, reference laboratories for oil certification, and phytosanitary labs were much needed in Pakistan to establish a full value chain of safe and highly nutritious tasty food that improved health dramatically.
He said that olive contributed to mitigating climate change impact as a smart tree against soil erosion and water consumption, inducing a low carbon footprint.
These were added value benefits for achieving the desired results in the sector in Pakistan, a country which had the potential to be a world leader in olive production, he said.
He said that Italian technical assistance for Pakistan in the olive growing sector started 40 years ago with adaptive research schemes to assess the viability for modern cultivation of the crop in Pakistan (in the 80s and 90s).
It was followed by the launch of the first significant olive crop investment (2012-2015) through the Pakistan Italian Debt Swap Agreement (PIDSA), resulting in 2000 hectares of plantation in marginal and wastelands, he said.
He said that in 2016, olive cultivation was introduced in the Programme for Poverty Reduction sponsored by the Italian government and executed by the Pakistan Poverty Alleviation Fund (PPAF), through which three oil extraction units were being established on a public-private partnership basis with the farmer communities.
Recently, in March 2022, a key project “Olive Culture Holistic and Multi-Professional Mechanism for a Pakistani Olive Oil Value Chain”, has been launched.