TIMERGARA: People in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa prefer to buy the famous ‘red blood orange’ of Rabat area to other varieties of orange produced in Malakand Agency and parts of Lower Dir despite its high price.

The blood orange of Rabat, Khall and adjoining areas is liked for its fine taste and colour, said an orange dealer Abdullah while talking to this correspondent at Rabat here on Sunday.

He said that the fruit was ripe and some growers had started plucking the fruit.

“The golden orange of Rabat and Khall is being sold at Rs1,500 per bag containing 100 oranges,” Mr Abdullah said, adding that oranges of Palai Malakand and Timergara were being sold at Rs700 per bag.

He said that lovers of the fresh fruit preferred the Rabat blood orange to oranges of other areas.

Habibul Haq, an agriculture officer, said that orange orchards were spread over 1,200 acres in different areas of Lower Dir, producing about 3,500 tons of the fruit annually.

He said that five different kinds of oranges were produced in Dir, but the most popular was the blood orange of Rabat and Khall, known as the ‘red blood orange’.

He said that the production remained low this year due to long drought-like situation in the area.

Talking to this scribe, local orange growers Khadim Hussain, Saiful Maluk and Khan Shehzada claimed that most of their fruit farms along the Panjkora River were washed away by flash floods in 2010.

They said that the government had done nothing so far to rehabilitate their gardens.

They said that the agriculture department should arrange a training programme for the orange farmers so that they could improve the fruit production. Dealers of the fresh fruit said that golden orange was being supplied to Peshawar, Rawalpindi, Lahore and Karachi while local people also offered the fruit as gift to their friends.

Said Rahim, a villager, said that poor people could not afford to buy blood oranges due to the high price.

He said that many people here preferred to buy ‘kino’ imported from Punjab as it was cheaper than the locally-produced orange fruit.

Published in Dawn, February 2nd, 2017