Coir pith from India to help green Arab desert

Kochi, Aug 13: Coir pith, which was once considered a problematic waste and is now being converted to a soil conditioner and plant nutrient source through a patented Indian technology, would be used in the Gulf countries to help green the Arab desert.

An agreement was signed here last evening between the National Research Development Corporation (NRDC), a Central Government Enterprise, and Alghanim Sons Group of Kuwait under which the NRDC will transfer the technology to commercialise the preparation of soil conditioner from coir pith.

The Kuwaiti firm has paid 40,000 US Dollars to purchase the technology for use in the Gulf countries.

Talking to newspersons after signing the agreement, Alghanim Sons Chief Operating Officer Steve Beaumont said that ''the Arab dream is to turn the desert green. Be it Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain or Qatar, all Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries are investing heavily in agriculture and horticulture. The potential demand for coir pith compost, which is a good organic manure and soil conditioner, will be limitless.'' He said the Gulf countries were earlier depending on peat moss imports from Australia and Europe to use as soil conditioners.

However, these countries have banned the digging of peat due to an environmental crisis caused by large-scale mining of peat bogs.

Mr Somnath Ghosh, CMD of NRDC, said that coir pith was in fact superior to peat moss in respect of nutrient content, conductivity and carbon:nitrogen ratio.

The technology to convert coir pith into a soil conditioner through bio-conversion was developed by the Alappuzha-based Central Coir Research Institute, under the Coir Board.

Coir Board obtained the patent for the technology in 2005 and then licensed it to the NRDC for commercial use.

Coir Board Chairman A C Jose described the signing of the agreement as a ''red letter day'' for the Board, as it was for the first time that one of the technologies developed by its research institute was being transferred to a foreign country. Mr Beaumont estimated that the demand for coir pith compost in the GCC countries was presently around 60,000 tonnes per annum. The compost would be delivered to Alghanim Sons through an Indian supplier, to whom the technology had been transferred earlier.

According to a spokesman for the Indian supplier, the company would initially supply 750 tonnes of coir pith compost per month and increase it to 2,500 tonnes within a year.

Dr U S Sharma, Director, CRRI, said that there should be no problem for Indian suppliers to meet the projected GCC demand, as the country was producing nearly 700,000 tonnes of coir pith every year.

According to Mr Beaumont, the agreement provided a great opportunity to the Coir Board to showcase its technology to the world, as the Gulf countries were generally considered the window to the rest of the world.

''Be it Japan, Europe or the US, they try their new technologies first in the Gulf to see how these will be used and promoted. The GCC countries were also on the lookout for the technologies of tomorrow. And, we feel that coir pith compost will be among the leading technologies in the next five years. This should definitely place India in a lead position for technology,'' he added.

Mr Anupam Dasgupta, Secretary, Union Ministry of Small Scale Industries and Agro and Rural industries, was also present at the function.

UNI