Pakistan's growing olive industry stymied by security
Posted: Wednesday, October 07, 2009 2:41 PM
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Islamabad, Pakistan
By Amna Nawaz, NBC News Producer
ISLAMABAD, PAKISTAN – I came to Pakistan for the olives. I am on a fellowship from the International Reporting Project, and I am working on a story about an agricultural development project launching an olive oil business here.
Pakistan is not in a region normally associated with olives. The Mediterranean Basin comes to mind, as do parts of North Africa and the Middle East.
But olives, as I’ve learned, are a sturdy fruit. There are hundreds of possible cultivars that can grow in dozens of different climates. A little less rain won’t hurt them. A little extra fertilizer won’t ruin an entire crop. There is room for error and less-than-expert knowledge to manage an orchard.
Evidence suggests the olive tree was being cultivated as early as 2500 B.C. in parts of the Mediterranean. So this is a tree that knows how to stick around.
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| Amna Nawaz / NBC News |
| Boxes of olives from a recent harvest in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas of Pakistan sit on a table as personnel discuss the future of the olive project. Since the region is too unsafe for develpoment workers to visit the orchards, the fruit had to be brought to the meeting in Islamabad. |
In the far corners of Pakistan, this is something many people already knew. Wild olive trees have grown for centuries in some of the country’s hardest-to-reach spots.
A recently conducted national survey found the most olive-friendly conditions right along the Northwest Frontier Province and Baluchistan, two of the country’s most troubled regions.
In an effort to try to develop a Pakistan olive industry, a project was started by international investors and a Pakistan agricultural development agency – the Pakistan Oil Seed Development Board. And hope for a new indigenous industry with enormous potential for Pakistan’s economy was ignited.
For the last few weeks, I have been traveling to project sites, speaking with the dedicated agency personnel spearheading the work, as well as community farmers who are taking part in the project. There is cautious excitement at the early signs of success.
There are actually millions of wild olive trees in Pakistan, but they don’t produce the ideal olives for consumption. So farmers are using grafting techniques to create new seedlings using parts of the old trees. Much of the work is still done by hand – from planting, to picking the olives, to pressing them. Once the scale of the project grows, the work is expected to become more mechanized.
'Cautious optimism'
Production on a substantial scale won’t happen for another few years – the first real harvest was just in September and October 2008. So far the sales are just for domestic consumption and are in small quantities. But some farmers have turned profits even on the small harvests they have planted so far – the kinds of profits they hadn’t previously been able to make with any other crop except for poppies.
"Cautious optimism" is the term that keeps coming up in describing the early sentiment. Progress is slow. Getting farmers to invest in this new crop, to believe that those trees they’ve long used for firewood can actually be turned into something more profitable, is a difficult task. Trust here is built with home visits and handshakes.
Which is why not being able to make those home visits or shake those hands is a huge setback. The attack on the U.N.’s World Food Program in Islamabad on Monday that killed five workers lays bare the risks aid workers take in Pakistan. Taliban militants claimed responsibility for the attack at the agency’s heavily fortified compound.
As a result of the attack, our plans to visit a farm in the Northwest Frontier Province were cancelled - adhering to guidance from many of the embassies in Islamabad that staff should lay low and not travel outside of the city. In fact, foreigners have been strongly encouraged not to leave Islamabad for the next few days. Which means not only that I can’t visit the farm, but the development agency can’t follow up either and ensure that the farmer’s progress continues.
This is the real story for why development dollars don’t really work here in Pakistan yet. Even a plan like this one – that relies more on Pakistan’s own indigenous crops, that focuses more on a Pakistani private-public partnership instead of foreign funds, that has already displayed early signs of success – even this plan can’t move forward without security.
It’s simple really. If you can’t even get to the places you’re supposed to help, how can you ever help? My inability to report the story as well as I’d like to these last few weeks is nothing compared to the frustration of the international and Pakistani aid workers who have been working on projects like this one for years.
I came here for the olive story. But like most stories in Pakistan these days, it has been quickly dominated by the security story.
Amna Nawaz is an NBC News Producer reporting from Pakistan on a grant from the International Reporting Project (IRP).
