RESEARCH ACTIVITIES ON JATROPHA CURCAS L.: SCREENING FOR SALT TOLERANCE OF SEVERAL ACCESSIONS FOR ADAPTATION TO THE SALT–ARID ENVIRONMENTS OF SOUTH IRAQ

Salt represents an important limitation factor for increasing productivity of agricultural growing in arid and semi-arid (Xiong et al., 2002; Ashraf, 2004). All over the word the 20% of the land and the 50% of irrigated land are affected by saltiness (Zhu, 2001). The keep decreasing of arable lands (O’Leary, 1984) and a increasing of food, fibre and energy (Janick, 1999) highlights the need to develop strategies in order to face and solve this problem. The saltiness affects specially the area of Dhi-Qar, Nassiryia district in Iraq, where the saltiness rate in the land and in the water of Euphrate river used for irrigation. Among the salt resistance crops, there are some oil crops no-food, low input and adapted to marginal land with low irrigation, with elevated capacity to regenerate degraded land. The cultivation is increasing for the relevance of the economic development of agricultural sector (Hosamani and Sattigeri,2000). Jatropha curcas is a shrub belonging to the Euphorbiaceous family spread in the tropical and subtropical countries (Heller, 1996) that lately is very studied for the potentiality as energy crop no-food and for the good capacity to produce vegetable oil in degraded and marginal land (Openshaw, 2000) as the Iraquen lands characterized by high salt concentration. The effects of the salt stress in jatropha at now are few studied and the research is straight on the productive capacity and the chemical characteristics of the oil as fuel. The aim of this work is to evaluate the salt resistance of a germoplasm collection of Jatropha curcas provenance through idroponic culture, in order to execute a quick screening for the cultivation in large plantation in Irak. The research is financed by the Italian Foreign Affair ministry for the intervention project of reconstruction in Dhi-Qar, Nassiriyah Region.