The Pakistan Agriculture Research Council has developed a new high-yielding garlic variety with the production potential of 24 tonnes per hectare. PARC chairman Dr Muhammad Azeem Khan has said that currently, Pakistan is at 19th position with an annual production of 81,167 tonnes of garlic, which is very low as compared to top yielding countries.
“As per the FAO data, top garlic producing countries in the world include China (22,333,877 tonnes), India (1,721,000 tonnes), Bangladesh (461,970 tonnes) and Egypt (286,213 tonnes),” said Dr M Azeem Khan.
This means the country has to import approximately 46139.8 tonnes from a country like China. At this point in time, the garlic import is immensely affected due to the outbreak of Covid-19. The PARC chairman also said that to bring research based agricultural solutions along with revolutionized and modernized agriculture and to obtain high yielding varieties of commercially important crops in Pakistan, the National Agricultural Research Centre, under the umbrella of Pakistan Agricultural Research Council, has established Research and Development programs.
The Vegetable Crop Research Program (VCRP) of Horticulture Research Institute (HRI), NARC started garlic variety development activity in 2009-10 to achieve high yielding garlic variety for the country.
A PARC spokesman said that leading scientist Humayoun Khan, with a team of co-breeders, started working on the development of NARC-G1 and it got approved. It is the highest yielding variety (24 ton/ha) as compared to all other garlic cultivars grown in the country. Dr Khan further added that a spot examination meeting was arranged in June 2020, at NARC for further progress in the variety approval case from the provincial seed council.
