Roundup: Sudanese palm festival kicks off

The Palm and Dates Festival was launched in Khartoum Thursday, in a effort to develop palm tree cultivation, upgrade production, open marketing prospects and indigenize new types of palm trees into Sudan.

Organized by the Sudanese Society for Palm Cultivation, the festival gives a chance to highlight the importance of palm trees, encourage farmers to introduce new types of dates and expand the sector to compete internationally, said the Society.

"Many studies proved that palm trees can be cultivated widely in Sudan's various states, introducing new types with distinct wet qualities and high productivity, imported from Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates," professor Abdel-Ghader Ahmed Al-Sheikh Al-Fadni, member of the Sudanese Society for Palm Cultivation, told Xinhua.

He reiterated the coordinated efforts between official and local authorities to encourage palm cultivation and draw attention to the types of dates in order to better employ them in supporting the country's economy.

"We are working on establishing industrial projects in the field of date processing and packaging," he noted.

According to recent statistics, there are about eight million palm trees in Sudan producing around 425,000 tons of dates annually.

However, many reasons prevent the country from becoming a major competitor in date-producing countries' market.

The reasons include lacking introduction of new types of palm trees into the Sudanese market, along with an absence of date-processing and packaging factories.

Sudan, which ranks as the eighth global date producer, exports only five percent of its annual dates crop to markets with weak purchasing power, such as neighboring African countries.

Meanwhile, palm farmers, namely in northern Sudan, complain about the low price of dates in local markets and the lack of export opportunities to foreign markets, threatening the future of Sudanese palm cultivation.

"We have reached a phase where palm trees are uprooted from farms in northern Sudan so that other crops can be cultivated in their place, namely due to low financial gain from dates," Mohamed Al-Tayeb Mohamed Khair, a palm farmer from northern Sudan, told Xinhua.

"It is unrealistic that the price of a sack of dates is only 50 Sudanese pounds (around five U.S. dollars). The state must intervene to increase the price of dates," he noted.

Though palm cultivation is an ancient Sudanese practice, yet palm products cannot be depended on as a staple crop nor included in the economy as a cash crop, mainly due to the dry texture of Sudanese dates in addition to negligent collecting, packaging and marketing processes.

Ibrahim Al-Jaz, a dates merchant in Khartoum, told Xinhua that "there are problems facing palm cultivation in Sudan, starting with the provision and import of palm seedlings all the way through to marketing, not to mention insect problems, harvesting and storage."

"Sudanese dates come in dry and semi-dry varieties, which international markets have little demand for. Wet date varieties are non-existent in Sudan. What is needed is to increase the import of international varieties of high-quality dates, and develop a solid reputation in international markets," he added.

Palm cultivation is present in three major Sudanese states, North Darfur, Nahral-Neel and North Sudan, producing 80 percent of the country's dates.

The remaining 20 percent is distributed between Kassala, the Red Sea and the states of Khartoum and Gezira. Endit