Helping hand: Local mangoes benefit from research

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s mango industry is producing better fruit and accessing more markets thanks to years of help from Australian researchers. Since 2006 the Australian government through the Australian Centre for International Agriculture Research (ACIAR) and AusAID, has been helping mango growers in Pakistan produce better mangoes, increase yields, fight disease and find alternative markets, Australia’s ABC Radio said on Wednesday. Pakistan has over 300,000 mango growers and late last year sent trial export shipments to China and Europe. Project coordinator Lex Baxter says it’s not “detrimental” to Australia’s mango industry to be helping Pakistan, which is the world’s fifth largest mango producer, and there will be a lot of spin-offs for Australia’s industry. “There are some really nasty pests and diseases (in Pakistan) and our researchers are getting experience with those, they can now identify them, they know how to work with them and now have control strategies worked out, which is good,” he says.

Published in The Express Tribune, August 22^nd 2013.

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