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Iraq's campaign to preserve its valuable date palms

Iraq'

 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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