By Qudsia Bano ISLAMABAD, Feb 18 (INP-WealthPK): Pakistan is one of the top 10 chilli-producing countries in the world, according to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), due to warm, humid and dry climate and a well-drained sandy loam with high organic content. Despite this, chilli production in Pakistan has been below the global average, and the country has also not been able to realise the full export potential of the crop due to a lack of modern drying technology. The average annual chilli production in Pakistan remained 143,428 tonnes from financial year 2014-15 to FY2017-18, but it dropped to 126,943 tonnes in FY2018-19, about 15% lower than the peak production of 148,114 tonnes in financial year 2017-18. To boost the country’s chilli production and protect crop from aflatoxins, the Pakistan Agriculture Research Council in collaboration with Korea Programme for International Cooperation in Agricultural Technology (KOPIA) has launched a three-year project to produce and dry chillies through modern technology. Dr Siddique Depar, a principal scientific officer at PARC’s Arid Zone Research Centre in Umarkot, Sindh, told WealthPK that chilli is a potential crop of Pakistan and has a lot of demand in the foreign market. “We used to export chilli to around 60 countries, but unfortunately we are losing this market as many consignments were sent back due to the high number of aflatoxins in chillies.” He said normally the amount of aflatoxin in chilli is 10 micrograms per kilogramme, but because of whitefly disease the amount has increased to 100 micrograms in Pakistani chillies, which is not acceptable to foreign clients. Dr Depar told WealthPK that in 2021, the PARC in collaboration with KOPIA launched a three-year project to produce and dry chillies through modern technology. He said the project will continue until 2024. “Under the project, PARC is setting up nurseries for proper disease-free production of chilli. KOPIA has also provided machinery for properly drying the chilli, which is helping local farmers a lot.” Dr Depar said the Korean entity is providing 40,000 dollars funding every year to help farmers adopt proper production and drying techniques. According to Dr Depar, a manual chilli drying method is applied in Pakistan, which is time-consuming as it takes around 10-12 days to dry a crop. “But with the machinery provided by KOPIA, the drying of chilli is now done within 18-25 hours.” He noted that the National Agriculture Research Centre of PARC has received two dehydration plants and a washing unit for installation at the Arid Zone Research Centre in Umarkot. “These plants will be utilised for red chilli drying to make them aflatoxin-free, which is a major impediment to chilli export.” Also in 2021, a prototype chilli farming initiative was launched in Lahore with the support of Sichuan Litong Food Group of China, which helped produced yields three times higher than the local production. According to Chen Changwei, chairman of the Chinese company, their chilli pilot farm project in Lahore completed 100 acres of cultivation in the first half of 2021. Seed quantities for the trial project were 380 grams per acre with a yield of three tonnes per acre.