The desert of Rajasthan in the north of India is to be planted with a million olive trees grown in Israel in an effort to transform the landscape and the fortunes of its struggling farmers.

The countries are finalising a three-year plan on agriculture that will introduce several crops associated with the Middle East and Mediterranean to India. It is hoped that the sub-continent — more famous today for its mangoes and spices — will become an exporter of olive oil by 2011.

Lior Weintrub, a spokesman for the Israeli Embassy in Delhi, said: “The symbolism is significant: an olive tree in the Middle East ... well, it means a lot.”

Diplomacy has also paved the way for dates and grapes from Israel to be grown in Maharashtra, a state in western India that has been blighted by tens of thousands of suicides among desperate smallholders in recent years.

Israeli technology companies will be drafted in to lend their expertise on matters such as water recycling and irrigation. In their home country, Israeli scientists have been credited with “greening” the Negev desert, performing what has been termed an agricultural miracle.

Indian olive oil is likely to find a ready market in the West as there is a global shortage of the product amid rising demand.

It is also hoped that the adoption of new crops and farming techniques can be a stepping stone towards a second green revolution in India — the first being the period in the 1960s and 1970s when the introduction of modern methods and new plant varieties radically boosted yields and eradicated famine.

Productivity growth in India's fields has since slowed to a crawl. In February the Government's official annual economic survey said that the farming sector, on which 70 per cent of the country's population depends for a living, was expected to grow 2.6 per cent this year, down from 3.8 per cent last year.

The report's authors gave warning of potentially dire consequences. “Due to uncertainties in global markets and hardening of international prices of food ... the food security of India critically depends on the farm sector,” they said.

Economists estimate that India's ability to increase harvests of staple foods such as grains, rice and pulses now runs at less than 1 per cent a year, lagging behind the 1.5 per cent population growth.

Dinker Panandikar, of the RPG Foundation, an economic think-tank, said: “It is touch and go whether India feeds itself.” Across India as many as 150,000 farmers have committed suicide in the past decade after falling behind in payments to money lenders, according to the Tata Institute of Social Sciences.

The Government took radical action this year when it waived £7.5 billion in debt owed by struggling farmers, as part of the annual budget.

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