The national tree of Iraq, the young date palm, forms a line that stretches from the edge of the desert near the capital city of Karbala to the horizon.
A campaign to
save a long-in-danger heritage culture, whose fruit once symbolized riches
throughout the Arab world, is focused on Iraq's treasured trees.
According to
Mohamed Abul-Maali, commercial director at the Fadak date plantation, "the
date palm is the symbol and pride of Iraq."
Iraq used to be
known as the "land of 30 million palm trees," but decades of strife
and environmental problems such as drought, desertification, and salinization
have made it difficult for the country to produce dates.
The 500-hectare
(1,235-acre) Fadak plantation is a farm. The 2016 effort, according to
Abul-Maali, aims to "return this culture to what it used to be."
More than 90
date types, including Iraqi but also Arab species, from the Gulf and North
Africa are stored in the grove, he continues. The Iraqi varieties were gathered
from all around the nation and are among "the rarest and best."
More than 6,000
of the 30,000 trees planted at Fadak are already bearing fruit, according to
Abul-Maali. He anticipates a harvest of 60 tons this year, a threefold increase
from 2021. The Fadak farm's rows of young trees contrast sharply with the
condition of plantations in other regions of the nation.
The area around
Basra, which used to be a center for date production in southern Iraq, is very
different from the Fadak setting, with its well-watered trees. The thin trunks
of palm trees that have been severed leave scars on the surrounding terrain.
Baghdad
destroyed vast swaths of land in the Shatt al-Arab region where the Euphrates
and Tigris rivers converge during its 1980–88 conflict with Iran. Date palm
trunks that had been cut down were frequently utilized to fill in and bury
irrigation canals that had grown inactive and dried up.
Alaa Al-Badran,
an agricultural engineer, says it "looks like a cemetery."
Before the
Iraqi-Iranian War, there were six million palm trees in the region; currently,
there are fewer than three million. A new challenge, according to Badran, is
"the salinization of the waters of the Shatt al-Arab and of the
land."
Desalination and
drip irrigation systems would be the answers. But it can get pricey, as Ahmed
Al-Awad points out; his family formerly owned 200 date palms in the region, but
now only has 50 of them left. The diminishing productivity of date palms has
been addressed, according to the Iraqi Agriculture Ministry.
In fact, Hadi
Al-Yasseri, a spokesman for the ministry, claims that in the past ten years,
there are now 17 million palm trees instead of the previous 11 million. A
government initiative to save the date palms was started in 2010, but Yasseri
claims that eight years later it was abandoned for lack of funding.
However, he
anticipates a relaunch because the upcoming government budget is expected to
include additional funding. According to government statistics, nearly 600,000
tons of dates were shipped from Iraq in 2021.
According to the
World Bank, fruit is the nation's second-largest export after oil. As per the
analysis, "the existing initiatives in Iraq to improve quality should be
continued as the worldwide demand is expanding."
The organization
regrets that a large portion of Iraq's crop is sold to the United Arab
Emirates, where dates are repackaged and reexported for higher prices, despite
the fact that exports bring in $120 million a year to the national economy.
On Iraq's
eastern border with Iran, in the town of Badra, complaints are a daily
occurrence. Amidst groves of palm trees that have been cut off, war's scars are
obvious.
Officials have
been lamenting the scarcity of water for more than ten years, and they've
accused Iran of diverting the Mirzabad River, also known as Al-Kalal locally,
upstream.
The date of
Badra is unmatched, according to Mussa Mohsen, who is the owner of about 800
date palm trees. He remembers that "in the past, we got water from
Al-Kalal that came from Iran."
"Badra was
like a sea, but today we depend on wells to irrigate."
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