The Last Date: Mandates to Improve Date Palm Production
Although consumers’ demand for a wide variety of date palms is being reached through a highly fragmented market, where both small and large market players help target narrower niches, inadequate farming practices fail to turn production into profit.
Date Farmers Continue to Struggle
The global date production has been setting new records to meet rising consumer demand. However, the issue lies in that large amounts of produces fail to meet quality standards been un-absorbed by the market due to non-compliance with quality standards and consumer needs. Although consumers’ demand for a wide variety of date palms is being reached through a highly fragmented market, where both small and large market players help target narrower niches, inadequate farming practices fail to turn production into profit. This is an emerging challenge among all date palms producers around the world.
Egypt is the leading producer in the palm date industry. Followed by Egypt (20% share), Iran (12.6%), Algeria (12.2%), Saudi Arabia (11.4%), and United Arab Emirates (7.9%) were the next top producers.¹ Although all major producers have witnessed production growth from the previous year, farmers have yet to experience significant gains in their labor.
The majority of farmers in the date palm industry are illiterate and of lower income bracket. The sociocultural status of the farmers hinders them from acquiring new technology, leaving them dependent on traditional farming methods.² Traditional cultivation system is susceptible to pest infestation, yielding poor quality dates. If enough dates get filtered out for quality assurance, the amount of harvest that reaches the market is proportionally low. Iran, for example, is known to have stringent quality requirements for date export which was instituted in order to preserve its international recognition as a major quality producer. With recent incidents of pest infestation and fungal disease, the low yield of quality dates will likely drive up the price for high-end dates…
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