JEDDAH, 19 May 2004 — Agriculture Minister Dr. Fahd Balghaneim yesterday called for greater efforts to increase the Kingdom’s date exports, which currently represented only nine percent in the world total of 384,000 tons.
“Although date production grew from 355,000 tons in 1982 to 829,000 in 2002, local factories process only 44,000 tons annually,” he told a meeting on agricultural marketing.
He said the Kingdom’s agricultural sector provided 563,000 jobs and contributed 8.3 percent of the GDP in 2002. The industry is 43 percent Saudized, he added.
“We intend to work out a 20-year agricultural development plan in cooperation with Prince Abdullah Research and Consultancy Center,” Balghaneim said.
“The plan will give a future vision of various agricultural activities to help the private sector draw out production policies,” he told businessmen and officials.
He emphasized the need to ward off the negative effect of the WTO on the Kingdom’s agricultural market with the required cuts in subsidies. “The opening up of markets and the free trade of products demand more coordination and consultation to exploit opportunities, increase achievements and reduce losses,” he said.
He noted the Agricultural Ministry’s efforts to achieve food security. “The agricultural sector has achieved steady growth, increasing the value of the gross agricultural product to more than SR36 billion in 2002,” the minister said.
He described date farming as an important agricultural activity dear to the Kingdom and its people.
Balghaneim underscored the government’s support for date palm farming as it subsidizes farmers with SR50 for each good variety of date palm planted and 25 halalas for each kilogram of dates produced. It also extends soft loans to date industries and purchases SR21,000 tons of dates annually at the rate of SR3 per kg. The Kingdom currently has 22 million date palms.
“Our meeting in Riyadh is significant as the region produces more than a quarter of the country’s total date output. We hope the meeting will boost date production and marketing,” Balghaneim said.
Abdul Rahman Al-Jeraisy, chairman of the Council of Saudi Chambers of Commerce and Industry, emphasized the importance of increasing the Kingdom’s date exports as well as marketing Saudi dates domestically.
