Pakistan’s decision to launch a National Olive Value Chain Policy is exactly the kind of practical intervention the economy has needed for years. The country spends around $4 billion annually on edible oil imports, according to the prime minister, and even a 10 percent reduction in that bill would save roughly $400 million in foreign exchange.
For an economy that routinely runs short of dollars, borrows to stabilise reserves and struggles to finance essential imports, that is no small matter. The more obvious question is why such a strategy took so long to acquire serious policy attention.
The logic is straightforward. Pakistan cannot continue treating import dependence as an unfortunate fact of life. Reducing the import bill is now a national economic requirement, particularly in areas where domestic production can realistically substitute for foreign supply. Edible oil is an obvious candidate because the country already has a developing olive sector, millions of olive plants, and external technical support that can be converted into a much larger agro-industrial base.
The new policy gets an important part of the equation right by looking beyond cultivation alone. Olive production will only become economically meaningful if farming is connected to processing, extraction, quality certification, branding, and export development. That is what turns a crop into a value chain. The decision to send agricultural graduates to Italy for advanced training and to build on existing cooperation in nurseries, laboratories and technical education should therefore be welcomed.
But this policy also exposes a wider failure in Pakistan’s agricultural and trade planning.
The country has allowed several areas of natural comparative advantage to deteriorate through weak policy, poor execution and distorted incentives. Cotton provides the clearest example. Domestic production has fallen sharply over the years, forcing greater reliance on imported raw material for the textile sector that remains Pakistan’s flagship export earner. Wheat has also repeatedly moved from abundance to shortage and import dependence because procurement, storage, and market management have failed to provide consistency. These are not isolated agricultural mishaps. They reflect the absence of a coherent production and trade strategy.
That absence has imposed a recurring cost on the external account. Pakistan tends to respond to foreign exchange pressure after it appears rather than designing domestic production around predictable import requirements and global export opportunities. A serious economic strategy would identify the products the country can efficiently substitute at home, the sectors in which it can build export competitiveness, and the infrastructure, technology and incentives required to achieve both. Import substitution and export promotion should form two sides of the same external-sector policy.
Olives fit neatly into that framework. The immediate objective should be to reduce edible oil imports without sacrificing quality or imposing inefficient protection on consumers. Over time, however, the ambition should go further. Pakistan’s membership of the International Olive Council, growing local expertise, and potential access to regional markets create an opportunity to develop olive oil as an export product as well. That will require consistent standards, traceability, branding and private investment, all areas where government must facilitate rather than micromanage.
The challenge, as always, will be implementation.
Pakistan has produced no shortage of promising agricultural policies. Too many have weakened once they reached the stage of coordination between federal and provincial governments, farmer support, research, extension services and market development. The olive policy will only succeed if progress is measured against hard outcomes: acreage brought under productive cultivation, oil produced, imports displaced, processing capacity created and exports generated.
The country can no longer afford agricultural policy built around announcements and targets disconnected from trade realities. Every unnecessary dollar spent on avoidable imports adds pressure to an already fragile external account. Every export opportunity missed makes that pressure worse.
The olive initiative is therefore welcome, but its real value lies in the principle behind it. Pakistan must begin systematically producing more of what it imports and exporting more of what the world wants. That should have been common sense long ago. It has now become an economic necessity.
Reference Link:- https://www.brecorder.com/news/40436925