Olive Oil and Rural Development in Egyptian Deserts

Abstract

The main aims of both sustainable agriculture and rural development are sustainable food production increasing, food security ensuring and supporting and livelihoods improving in rural areas. Value-added is recognized as the main option for the policies of both agriculture and rural development. Many procedures related to high value-added food products such offering greater quality, or different nutritional factors, or increased convenience for consumers. So olive oil and olive mill wastes could play an important role in rural development in Egyptian desserts through increasing income. Increasing economic value of olive oil could be achieved by improving the oil yield and quality through attained of the factors affecting olive oil yield and quality. These factors include agricultural practices of the olive tree, maturity stage, olive harvesting, transport of the olives to the mill. Also, time between the harvesting and the extraction of the oil, the post-harvest of mill olives, leaf removal and olive washing are another factors. In addition to olive crushing, olive paste malaxation, olive oil extraction systems, enzymes addition and wastewater recycling. On the other hand, the olive mill produced huge amounts of three wastes (olive leaves, olive mill cake or pomace and olive mill wastewater). These wastes could be utilized in several ways (pharmaceutical purposes, animal feed production, biological control, production of antioxidant and antimicrobial agents, improvement of some olive oil characteristics, ethanol production, mushroom and S.C.P. production, exo-enzyme production, Irrigation and Fertilization uses) to be another source of added value to olive oil production.