The Eastern Province is experiencing extreme cold weather these days, but damage to crops is not serious, two experts of the sector have said.

Nonetheless, they warned farmers against the random mechanisms of planting seasonal crops, saying that the delay in organizing the market is causing price fluctuations and instability.

There is no defined deliberated plan for agricultural production that makes prices so low that it cannot cover the labor cost, they told Al-Eqtisadiah newspaper.

Mohammad Al-Dayel, chairman of the agricultural committee at the Eastern Province Chamber of Commerce and Industry (EPCCI), said there are no accurate data on farms and their owners in the Eastern Province, but their number is estimated at 300.

This season, the committee started to address farmers all over the Kingdom to know their exact number, so as to organize the whole sector with the implementation of a binding regulation that obliges farmers to enroll in the agricultural register and obtain a certificate, pending the results of an official study at a cost of approximately SR 1 billion.

Al-Dayel said the committee called for a meeting next month with Eastern Province farmers to develop a list of their names and addresses, and find out the problems they are facing, in addition to familiarizing them with the new directions of the Ministry of Agriculture.

“The farms that have been operating on locations leased by the secretariat are not related to the official farms, as they fall not under the jurisdiction of municipalities but of the Ministry of Agriculture itself,” said Al Dayel.

He explained that markets are subject to supply and demand, so each farmer should make sure a balance exists between his products and the market. “The problem lies in dumping the market with a specific product in the season, as framers tend to replicate and emulate each other, which results in a sharp decline in the prices of their products.”

In the same context, Jafar Safwani, a member of the EPCCI agricultural committee, stressed that the prices were better than last season. “The cold weather in the Eastern Province is not a matter of concern at the moment, while agricultural products of other provinces in the north will be protected inside greenhouses,” he said.

Safwani pointed out that the Agricultural Development Fund set out a plan to study all seven initiatives with the aim of organizing agricultural production across the Kingdom, by specifying the products each farm should yield and the quantities that should enter local markets to satisfactory levels. Surpluses could then be exported.