CERD design project to boost fruit, vegetable

Lahore: The Centre of Excellence in Rural Development (CERD) and the International Centre for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) have designed a project to promote the quality and quantity of the production of fruits, vegetables and horticulture sector for producing export quality products, including honey through the development of pollination industry.

Under this project both the organisations will ensure pollination management through establishment of small-scale honeybee keeping industry. The total budget of the project is Rs 20.206 million out of which Agribusiness Support Fund (ASF) will provide Rs 7.893 million, sources in the ASF said.

The project will be permanently based in Kohat and Karak districts with its operations spread also to Punjab and NWFP as per availability of flora during different times of the year. Though many crops will be benefited from the project, however, the specific focus of project activities will be on ber, apples, and citrus.

Sources said that under this project, both the organisations would build a cadre of 60 beekeepers from private sector, public and NGO sectors by imparting new knowledge and techniques of bee keeping and pollination. They would train some 120 male and female farmers as paraprofessionals in beekeeping management, honey production, value chain and marketing, judicial use of pesticides to save honey bees and managed pollination for increasing crop production.

The project is also aimed at enhancing production of fruits and vegetables, thus leading to higher export and to produce export quality honey and other bee products. Enhancing capacity at policy to action level about importance of beekeeping to rural development, crop production and conservation of biodiversity. Under this project, these organisations would conduct a baseline study of the project area to assess the potential of beekeeping and need for managed pollination.

Studies on value-chain, marketing of bee products and impact assessment and training of 60 Master Trainers for a rigorous 45 days training programme out of which, each trainee would further train two to three persons for short-term to serve as workers.

The project would also provide 20 beehives, nucleus colonies and bee equipment to the Master Trainers to start up a small business of bee products. In the past, many honey bee training programmes organised by the public sector and NGOs failed as the farmers were trained in bee keeping but they were not provided with the reasonable number of seed colonies to kick-start the business, proposal of the project stated.

It would also help the farmers to develop another 20 colonies by linking them with the micro-credit institutions, development of market linkages to process/export honey as per international standards and creating awareness and advocacy for bee keeping and managed pollination.

The project describing the pollination stated that it is an important step in the reproduction of seed plants through seeds. It is synonymous to fertilisation, which is the transfer of pollen from the male part (stamen) to the female part (pistil) of a flower or different flowers. In economic biology, it describes the percentage of seed set or fruit development.

Nature has provided several methods to pollinate and fertilise plant flowers. The simplest of these is self-pollination, whereby pollen from a flower pollinates and fertilises the ovules of the same flower. Some times self pollinated plants do not require any outside assistance from wind or bees for complete pollination. But in other self-pollinated plants, these agents are needed to move the pollen about.

Cross-pollination is necessary in many of the vine crops such as cucumbers where male flowers produce only pollen and female flowers have only the pistil. Bees, particularly honey bees, are essential for cucumber pollination. A third method is transfer of pollen from a flower of one plant to a flower of another.

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