Hummus-Sana
The production of chickpeas from the olive harvest for the 2019 season increased by about 14,000 tons from the previous year, as the quantities of olive produced amounted to about 75,000 tons.
According to a number of farmers in the governorate, the reasons for increased production are due to the appropriate weather conditions that coincided with the flowering process, contract growth and fruits, and the crop is free of diseases and pests, especially the olive worm, which spread widely in the 2018 season and hit orchards with rates ranging between 30 and 90 percent.
Among the farmer, Amer Abboud, from the village of Qalatiyah in the western countryside of Homs, there is a marked improvement in olive production for the current season compared to the previous season, especially in the field of oil production, where the rate of oil extraction increased in the contemporary.
Muhammad Sarhan, the owner of a press in the village of Maskana in the southern countryside of Homs, stressed that production this season was much better than the previous year in terms of the quantity of olive supplied to the press, the quantity, quality, validity and purity of the produced oil, in addition to the high percentage of oil extraction, attributing the reason to the appropriate weather conditions.
On the farmers ’demands to find markets for the disposal of excess oil produced, because it is sold at cost at local markets, Eng. Muwaffaq Zakaria, head of the marketing office in the Agricultural Union of Homs, pointed out that a memorandum was sent to the General Union to export at least 300 thousand oil tanks in excess of local consumption in The province, in addition to the necessity to search for outlets for the disposal of the product, knowing that the production reached 900 thousand tin, indicating that the union seeks to equate the peasants by searching for ways to export the product of surplus oil at reasonable prices to the cost of production.
Engineer Nazih Al-Rifai, Director of Homs Agriculture, said that the governorate is a pioneer at the country level in terms of cultivated areas amounting to 963 thousand dunums, with a number of trees exceeding 15 million trees, of which more than 10 million are fruitful trees and the majority of them are planted in rainfed lands and constitute an important source of income for farmers, noting that the most important areas It is cultivated in the area of Al-Mukhram, the eastern center, Tal Kalakh and Taldo al-Qusayr.
Abdul Hamid Junaidi
SANA Economic Bulletin
