The Southern Region Investment Commission has allotted 7,750ht of land for agricultural investors interested in developing pineapples. SNV Ethiopia, a Dutch developmental organization, will be providing technical support.
 

Despite the fact that government land was never previously zoned for pineapple farming in Ethiopia, the Southern Region Investment Commission now has land specifically zoned for this purpose in five of its woredas. Commission officials say they are responding to a steady stream of land requests by cultivators for areas to grow pineapples.
 

Kaleb Service Farmers’ House Plc is one of these companies.  In 2004, Kaleb established a pineapple-processing factory in the Oromia Region, in Nazareth, 100 km from Addis Ababa, with a capital of one million Birr.
 

Although the company established the factory with the idea of carrying out its own pineapple farming, it also had a plan to purchase the pineapples from outside growers. But unfortunately, the regional state authorities rejected a request for 25ht of land and the pineapples he received from outside farmers were of poor quality resulting in the halting of operations at the factory.
 

But the general manager of Kaleb Service Farmers’ House, Tesfaye Tekle Haimanot told Fortune that cultivators who dabbled in pineapple growing at the time never failed in their interest in revitalizing the business, even after the factory closure, which cost the company a 680,000 Br loss and the shedding of 18 jobs.

A huge challenge for anyone entering the pineapple business is finding seeds at affordable prices because in Ethiopia, on a commercial level, the so-called tissue culture does not exist. Tissue culture is the ability to mass-produce seeds in a laboratory from a small original sample.

Tissue culture laboratories in Ethiopia are either located at universities or at agricultural laboratories and even then, labs are not used to work on any commercial level. Hence, the market is unable to provide these pineapple seeds, leading the cultivators entering the pineapple sector to have to look outside the country.
 

Lakew Belayneh, general manager of the Godjeb Agricultural Development Enterprise, a state farm, said that in 2004, the enterprise’s local pineapple seeds had gone bad, so it imported two shipping containers from South Africa, paying 220,000 Br in tax, a prohibitive cost forcing the company to not repeat any seed importation.
 

But in the enterprise’s 2006-2007 plan, the goal is to cultivate 500ht of pineapples. For this plan to come to life, Godjeb needs 44,000 seedlings, which the enterprise knows will be a challenge, as the seed supply problem is bound to arise.
 

Good news might be on the way. During a workshop held in Awassa organized by the Investment Commission and Dutch advisors from SNV, it was announced that SNV and Jimma University were close to solving the seed supply situation.
 

Already, it was said, SNV had granted the University 750,000 Br so that a half a million seeds could be produced. According to university sources, the pineapple tissue culture will be ready after the Ethiopian New Year in September.
 

Interestingly, the seeds will be coming out the same laboratory run by the Jimma Agricultural Research Center that is currently carrying out vast agricultural research on seeds and farm animal development, situated 10Km away from the town of Jimma itself, in a place called Fisho.

Researchers at the laboratory claimed to Fortune that the pineapple seeds developed under its auspices could be considered the best in the world.
 

The pineapple is a tropical plant. Southeast Asian countries dominate the world pineapple market, which is estimated at 14.2 million dollars, but countries like the Ivory Coast and Brazil are closing the gap fast.
 

The pineapple market in Ethiopia, despite the Kaleb factory setback, is slowly developing with produce being cultivated in the Southern, Oromia and Amhara regions Promoting their pineapple campaign, Yeshetilla Safu, the Southern Region Investment Commission ‘s Potential Studies and Promotion department head, told Fortune that cultivators thinking of entering the pineapple sector would not encounter any bureaucratic challenges involving land procurement. Not only is the region offering land for more reasonable prices, he said, but they will also allow investors to cultivate the land without a lease.

In the Southern Regional state, farming land can be sold for anywhere between  30 Br to 117 Br per hectare.