Dates in Basra

Dates in Basra

Posted on 15 October 2010. Tags: Basra, dates
Dates in Basra

An official in the Iraqi Ports Department reported on Wednesday that a ship carrying Iraqi dates is en-route for one of the Gulf States, the first shipment of this once world-famous Iraqi product to leave the country since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

AKnews reports that the director of the Department’s media office, Ammar al-Safi, said that this 1,500 ton shipment is only the first; further cargos of different varieties of dates are expected to be exported through the country’s ports in the near future.

The renewal of date exportation from Iraq is part of the government’s plan to develop alternative sources of revenue in an economy that has an almost 95% dependency on oil revenues.

In the 1970s, Iraq’s 34 million date palms accounted for 30% of total world production. Annual exports from the Basra province alone reached more than 130,000 tons.

The region, once home to almost 13 million palm trees, acclaimed to be among the finest in the world, suffered greatly during the Iraqi-Iranian war which began in 1980 when the Saddam regime ordered the destruction of many of the palms as part of a ‘construction’ campaign to enhance security in the region.

In more recent years, the outbreak of the 2003 war brought further devastation to the agricultural areas of Faw and Abu Khusaib and Shatt al-Arab in the Basra province.

Many orchards were seriously damaged as hundreds of families were displaced from the Ahwar marshes to the palm groves. At the same time, benefiting from the chaos in the region, gangs were seizing farmland by force and reselling it to developers.

Ministerial figures for 2003 indicate that there remained only three million date palms in the province, indicating that 10 million had been destroyed over the previous 20 years.

ccurate statistics are not available concerning Iraq’s current date production but the Ministry of Agriculture has said that plans underway to develop the industry in Iraq will bring the total number of date palms in the country to around 50 million.

A comprehensive initiative for agricultural development was launched by the ministry in 2007 which set a ten-year deadline to reach the stage of self-sufficiency in strategic crops, relieving the country of its almost total dependency on imports.

The initiative includes, providing farmers with seeds, fertilizers, pesticides, agricultural land and financial subsidies.