Making the remarks during his one-day trip to West Azarbaijan Province, he said that wheat harvesting in southern provinces under projects of International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas (ICARDA) and Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS) have started as of two months ago.
The official informed that thanks to the recent flash-floods in southern provinces, in particular Khouzestan, wheat production has increased by 30 percent in comparison with the preceding year.
He described that the recent precipitations have increased wheat production in the current year and up to the present time, the government has purchased 1.2 million tons of wheat from the farmers.
As previously reported, Iran’s self-sufficiency rate in wheat production has increased from 65 percent in the Iranian calendar year of 1392 (March 2013-March 2014) to 105 percent in the current year (which ends on March 20, 2019).
The International Center for Agriculture Research in the Dry Areas, a member of the CGIAR, supported by the CGIAR Fund, is a non-profit agricultural research institute that aims to improve the livelihoods of the resource-poor across the world’s dry areas.
One potential means of encouraging farmer confidence in new varieties is Participatory Varietal Selection (PVS), providing farmers a choice of crop varieties which are matched to their specific needs. PVS schemes throughout the world, across multiple farming systems, are generating impressive results and the approach is now being applied in Morocco through the EU-IFAD initiative, managed by ICARDA (within the frame of the CGIAR Research Program on Grain Legumes) and targeting strengthened wheat-legume production systems across North Africa and West Asia.
ICARDA has conducted successful researches on how to beat the wheat bug in Iran and the country plans to resolve problems in agricultural section by developing practical researches in cooperation with the international body.
- source : Mehrnews
