Multan Chamber of Commerce & Industry (MCCI), USAID, and Agribusiness Support Fund (ASF) jointly organised a workshop here which was attended by more than 130 traders and farmers of fruits, vegetable, dairy and meat. The workshop was chaired by Mian Anis A. Sheikh, President MCCI while Khawaja Muhammad Hussain, Senior Vice President MCCI, Asad Zahoor, Deputy Chief of USAID, Mian Mumtaz, Colonel Tariq Ahmed (Retd), Haseeb Khan, Tariq Mirza delivered lectures on the occassion.
Asad Zahoor said that ASF has recently completed a Rs 31 million date-palm protection project with matching-grant support of Rs 15.5 million. For the first time in the history of the country, such a project has been implemented at the macro level to cater to the needs of date palm growers covering all the major date-palm producing regions of Pakistan.
Over 300,000 Tyvek bags were distributed to the date-palm growers and training programmes were organised in Good Agricultural Practices. With the assistance of local associations, NGOs and Rural Support Programmes, the project was successfully implemented in Khairpur & Sukkar (Sindh), MuzaffarGarh (Punjab), D. I. Khan (Khyber Pakhtunkhwa) and Turbat & Punjgoor (Balochistan).
Stakeholder groups of Livestock and fruits discussed different problems confronted by them. ASF official said that the fund supported 324 kinnow growers in 16 marketing organisations to market their fruit at international exhibitions as far afield as Berlin; Hong Kong, China; and Moscow. The project improved the marketing and distribution of 150,000 tons of annual kinnow production, about 75percent of Pakistan kinnow exports.
Comments
Comments are closed.