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Egypt’s Agriculture Minister Ezz El Din Abu Steit has unveiled the country’s ambi­tious goal of plant­ing 100 mil­lion olive trees in Egypt by 2022 in an effort to boost the coun­try’s olive oil pro­duc­tion.

The plan was announced at a sem­i­nar on new invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ties in the Egyptian olive sector, which pre­ceded the International Olive Council’s (IOC) fifty-third meet­ing that took place in Cairo last month. Egypt rejoined the IOC last year after its mem­ber­ship was revoked in 2017.

The Egyptian gov­ern­ment has made plots of land avail­able for investors. Both Egyptian and for­eign investors will have access to plots making up 10,000 acres in Upper Egypt’s West Minya and 25,000 acres in Matrouh, along with des­ig­nated land in the oases of the Western Desert.

A fur­ther, 10,000 acres in the El Tur area of the south­ern Sinai Peninsula will be reserved exclu­sively for Egyptian investors.

Abu Steit high­lighted progress on the expan­sion of Egypt’s olive groves, which have grown from 5,000 acres in the late 1970s to 108,000 by the mil­len­nium and now encom­pass 240,000 acres.

Egypt is the world’s second largest pro­ducer of table olives and pro­duced around 450,000 tons in 2018/19 of which around 100,000 tons were exported.

Whilst the coun­try has been able to sat­isfy its 3,260 per­cent growth in domes­tic con­sump­tion of table olives, olive oil pro­duc­tion has been a meagre 20,000 tons. Many in the agri­cul­tural sector hope increas­ing olive oil pro­duc­tion will bring much needed added value to the sector.

Hussein Abu Saddam, head of the Egyptian Farmers Syndicate con­firmed the need for investors to boost olive oil pro­duc­tion, telling Al-Monitor: “This step is inevitable. The olive tree is the most suit­able tree to be cul­ti­vated in the coun­try since it can be planted in dif­fer­ent types of soil and does not con­sume large quan­ti­ties of water.”

He also raised the need for the gov­ern­ment to intro­duce mea­sures that would pre­vent and combat olive tree dis­eases during the expan­sion pro­gram.

Abu Saddam who said that 100 mil­lion olive trees equated to an olive tree for every cit­i­zen added, “we need well-equipped fac­to­ries to extract and pro­duce olive oil. These fac­to­ries should be estab­lished near the plots planted with olives. So it is very impor­tant to breathe new life into agri­cul­tural invest­ment.”

Last year Olive Oil Times reported on Egypt’s aspi­ra­tion to become the world’s number one table olive pro­ducer by expand­ing the vari­eties of olives cul­ti­vated and increas­ing pro­duc­tion in desert lands.

Opening doors to for­eign investors in the olive sector would boost the country’s ailing econ­omy and pro­vide much needed hard cur­rency as well as cre­at­ing jobs in the coun­try, which is still feel­ing the impacts of its 2011 rev­o­lu­tion.

Egypt has strug­gled to raise the $58 bil­lion needed to fund the cre­ation of its new and as yet unnamed cap­i­tal city, which would be located about 30 miles east of Cairo by mid 2020.

• Al-Monitor