The Planning Commission is likely to show its largesse by allocating funds for a corruption marred project, the olive commercial cultivation project, which has failed to take off during the last three years due to the corrupt practices and incompetency of the executing agency, an official source said.
Giving details, the source said that the Rs 2.5 billion project for the promotion of the olive cultivation on commercial scale in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Balochistan and Punjab, was initiated under PSDP funds in 2014. It is important to mention that the project was a replica of an already failed project of Rs 300 million undertaken through the Italian debt swap agreement between the 2009-2014 period.
The project was approved on the recommendation of the Ministry of Food Security and Research (MSFR) while its implementation was entrusted to the Pakistan Agricultural Research Council (PARC), which is primarily a research body. Chief Agriculture Planning Commission had opposed the selection of PARC as the executing agency and had recommended giving the task to Pakistan Oil-seed Development Board, which has a mandate for these type of endeavours.
However, the MSFR ignored these recommendations and directed PARC to implement the project. The project failed to take off as a controversy surfaced in the beginning when it transpired that millions of rupees were wasted in procuring unapproved olive plants that were unfit to grow in the Pakistani climate.
As serious irregularities were reported in the project, MFSR was forced to refer the case to FIA for an investigation. The source said that the FIA, instead of investigating the then officers of MFSR and top officials of PARC, gave them a clean chit and has fixed the responsibility for corrupt practices on the suppliers, which were actually front men of the officers.
The source said the project is of vital importance to Pakistan, as the country annually imports edible oil worth $ 3 billion. However, before allocating funds for the project, the Planning Commission should have stressed for fixing the responsibility to avoid a third time repetition of corruption.
The source said the senior officials of MFSR and National Agricultural Research Centre (NARC) had lobbied hard to get the funds for the project and even met with the Minister for Planning Ahsan Iqbal. The MFSR wants NARC to implement the project as PARC has refused to implement the project. NARC is also not likely to successfully implement the project as it also lacks the required expertise in oil-seed development.
The project aims at commercial level cultivation of olive on 50,000 acres land in the country.
The minister was briefed that a total of 240,000 olive plants were purchased, while 11,565 plants were distributed among component units. The minister was informed that plantation on 115 acres has been completed. He was further informed that propagation of 525,000 olive cuttings and air layering have also been practiced.
The minister directed the officials that through this project, Pakistan would develop infrastructure for mass-scale production of olive nursery plants and provision of olive extraction units.
