Record Heatwave and Drought in Pakistan Threaten Crops and Olive Farming

Pakistan is in the midst of a pro­longed heat­wave, which has caused severe water short­ages impact­ing the peo­ple’s health and agri­cul­tural pro­duc­tion.

The water short­ages are impact­ing all types of agri­cul­tural pro­duc­ers. According to Manzoor Wassan, sec­re­tary of agri­cul­ture in the Sindh region, they are affect­ing olive groves, cere­als, man­gos, pep­pers, palm orchards and sug­ar­cane.

Along with the per­ni­cious effects of the drought, farm­ers are also try­ing to recover from mas­sive flood­ing caused by melt­ing glac­i­ers in the moun­tain­ous north of the coun­try due to the extreme heat.

Sindh is a south­ern Pakistani region home to sev­eral of the nation’s olive grow­ing devel­op­ment projects. Most of those projects focus on irri­gated high-den­sity and super-high-den­sity groves.

The record-break­ing heat­wave hit­ting the coun­try raised tem­per­a­tures to 45 °C in April and March.

Rising tem­per­a­tures, in turn, caused a surge in demand for elec­tric­ity to power fans and air con­di­tion­ers while also exac­er­bat­ing the water cri­sis.

Jacobabad, a city in Sindh, expe­ri­enced its hottest April in the last 122 years, with tem­per­a­tures hit­ting 49 °C.

According to the United Nations News Service, the Pakistani Meteorological Department is warn­ing that the unusual heat lev­els would accel­er­ate snow and ice melt in the moun­tain­ous regions of Gilgit-Baltistan and Khyber Pakhtunkwa, pos­si­bly trig­ger­ing glacial lake floods or flash floods in vul­ner­a­ble areas.

Wassan warned that water is dis­ap­pear­ing from the canals used in Sindh for irri­ga­tion. The share of water avail­able for agri­cul­ture has now fallen 47 per­cent and is get­ting worse by the day.

An even more urgent alarm came from the Sindh infor­ma­tion sec­re­tary, Sharjeel Memon, who appealed to the fed­eral gov­ern­ment for quick inter­ven­tion.

“There is a severe short­age of drink­ing water in the province and prob­lems in irri­ga­tion canals,” he said. ​“The econ­omy will face more dif­fi­cul­ties if the sit­u­a­tion is not addressed.”

According to local offi­cials, the Indus River reser­voirs of Guddu, Sukkur and Kotri have seen their lev­els drop sig­nif­i­cantly and are now in a range between 40 and 51 per­cent of the nor­mal level.

The Indus River is the most rel­e­vant source for the coun­try’s water dis­tri­b­u­tion infra­struc­ture.

Research recently pub­lished by the Pakistan Institute of Development Economics con­firmed that the causes of the coun­try’s water scarcity are related to the rapid pop­u­la­tion growth com­bined with the grow­ing effects of cli­mate change, which is exac­er­bat­ing floods and droughts.

According to the study, water scarcity is also due to poor water man­age­ment in the agri­cul­tural sec­tor, old or inef­fi­cient infra­struc­ture and wide­spread water pol­lu­tion prob­lems.

United Nations data from 2021 cited by the research show that only 36 per­cent of the pop­u­la­tion has access to safe drink­ing water.

The data also show that the coun­try’s irri­ga­tion sys­tem receives an effi­ciency rate of less than 39 per­cent. Of the 143 bil­lion cubic meters avail­able at the canal head­works, only 55 bil­lion arrive in the fields.

The fig­ure is emblem­atic of the chal­lenges the regional and fed­eral gov­ern­ments have to face to sup­port the coun­try’s agri­cul­tural out­put.

While olive grow­ing in Sindh has just begun to develop, olive farm­ing has been the core of many devel­op­ment projects in other regions of Pakistan in recent years.

Under the Ten Billion Tree Tsunami Project, Pakistan is grow­ing thou­sands of olive trees and aims soon to reach four mil­lion hectares of olive grow­ing sur­face.

In Sindh, the first olive grove was recently announced, with sev­eral devel­op­ment projects being explored. International pat­terns, includ­ing Italy, are among the biggest back­ers and investors in Pakistan’s fledg­ling olive sec­tor.

The International Olive Council (IOC) and Pakistani gov­ern­ment rep­re­sen­ta­tives recently announced that the coun­try is enter­ing the coun­cil as its 19^th mem­ber.

The announce­ment came as a con­se­quence of the ongo­ing devel­op­ment of olive infra­struc­ture in the coun­try, includ­ing nurs­eries, lab­o­ra­to­ries and mills. One of the incen­tives to join the IOC is the poten­tial to strengthen inter­na­tional coop­er­a­tion, which has sup­ported the coun­try’s olive ini­tia­tives.

“Pakistan feels the need to con­nect with the coun­cil as they are devel­op­ing their olive sec­tor and their inter­nal olive oil con­sump­tion grows,” Abdellatif Ghedira, the IOC’s exec­u­tive direc­tor, recently told Olive Oil Times.

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