Jordan and Saudi Arabia will soon discuss lifting Saudi's nearly decade-old ban on imports of Jordanian produce, a Jordanian official said on Sunday.
In the early 1990s, Saudi Arabia slapped a ban on Jordanian produce based on concerns that farmers in the Jordan Valley were using treated wastewater for irrigation.
“Saudi technical committees will come within the next few days to see, on the ground, the sources of [water] used [to irrigate] vegetables in Jordan,” Assad Abul Ragheb, the agriculture ministry's acting secretary general, told the Jordan Times.
“While Jordanian vegetable exports [to Saudi] in the late 1980s reached around 220,000 tons per year, the number dropped by 1999 to only 200 tons,” said the ministry official.
Since early 2000 until now, Saudi Arabia has enforced a complete ban on Jordanian produce imports.
According to Abul Ragheb, the Saudi and the Gulf markets are important to Jordanian farmers “and we hope that the Saudis will reconsider their decision to ban the country's vegetable imports.”
Jordanian produce, he added, enjoyed a good reputation in Europe since it met the standards and specifications demanded there.
The acting director of the Agricultural Marketing Organization (AMO), Mahmoud Hiyari, told the paper that his agency was ready to offer technical assistance to help the Saudi committees study Jordan's vegetable cultivation practices.
Saudi Arabia, he added, usually imported Jordanian agricultural produce during the summer, and at that time most vegetables in Jordan are planted in the hilly areas, places which depend on groundwater instead of water coming from dams in the Jordan Valley.
Jordan's agricultural exports were seriously harmed in the early 1990s after the kingdom was perceived to have supported Iraq in its invasion of Kuwait – Albawaba.com
© 2001 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
