PESHAWAR, Feb 21: The Pakistan Oilseed Development Board has purchased olive branches worth Rs1 million from Afghanistan which will be grafted into wild olive plants in the NWFP and Punjab's Potohar region to make them produce oil, sources told Dawn.

Officials at the Agricultural Research Institute, Tarnab, here said the country had olive forests but the local variety did not produce oil due to some reason.

Olive branches purchased from Nangarhar, Afghanistan, would be grafted into these wild mature olive plants grown in the NWFP and Punjab to convert them into an oil-producing variety, they added.

The Federal Ministry for Food and Agriculture had launched a seven-year olive plant promotion and cultivation project in 2000 to achieve self-sufficiency in edible oil production at a cost of Rs190 million.

Pakistan annually imports about 1.3 million tons of edible oil to meet its domestic consumption, whereas its total edible-oil import bill is around Rs40 billion per annum.

An official told Dawn on Tuesday that one million wild olive plants would be converted into oil-producing species in 2004-05. He said at present Pakistan completely depended on Afghanistan for the import of bud wood for olive grafting.

He said Afghanistan's olive orchards, spread over 2,000 hectors in Nangarhar province, had 23 best varieties of olive.

Under the project, about 700,000 wild olive plants had been grafted so far in the NWFP, Punjab and Balochistan, the official said, adding that olive plants had been grown over 300 acres in various areas of the country.

The farmer community had grown up to 150,000 olive plants, he said. In addition, the Agriculture Research Institute at Tarnab had started cultivating olive plants in the remote parts of Fata in collaboration with the Pakistan Army.

The Tarnab farm officials said the federal food secretary who presided over the project's steering committee meeting held in Khanpur last month, directed the officials concerned to expedite work on signing a bilateral agreement with the Afghan government to allow import of bud wood for grafting wild olive forests.