Plants are the natural source of many daily life use products. They are giving us the
essential commodities of life and ensuring a luxurious life to humans. This luxurious life
costs a country with a budget deficit if it is itself not growing the economically important plant
in its own territory. Such is the case with Pakistan. Although we are an agricultural country,
we are unable to use plants for our daily life usage and to counter the problems of budget
deficit. In this regard we can quote many economically important plants which are directly
playing a major role in the economy of a country.
The one plant among many economical plants are the olives. Olives have many roles to play
as they provide humans with an essential olive oil which has a great number of uses in daily
life. Every year we import a great number of olive oil from the world to meet the demand of
our people. This act puts a lot of pressure on our economy and eventually leads to the
budget deficit. This deficit hurts our economy as we can’t afford such types of imports any
more. Thus, in order to meet the demand of our population regarding olive oil we need to
plant suitable varieties of olive trees in our own territory to cope up with the economic issues.
Therefore, in this regard after a lot of research work we have seen that the Barani agriculture
research institute has developed two olive varieties as Bari Zaitoon 1 and 2. This was a
great development regarding olive and these varieties have shown some amazing results.
These varieties were sown in the plains of Pothowar and the surrounding areas. The plant
starts fruiting after its 4 years of planting and once it starts fruiting we will see its impact, as it
will provide us with sufficient olive oil to meet the needs of our country. Similarly, at the same
time it will save millions of dollars and those dollars can be invested in some other cause,
maybe for health betterment, education, infrastructure or any other such thing.
In a nutshell, we can say that the plants, if properly used, can become the backbone of the
economy. It can maintain our budget deficit issue and can reduce the import bill, which will
eventually lead to prosperity.
By Sabtain Haider…