DOHA: The Third Local Dates Festival, organised by the agricultural affairs department of the Ministry of Municipality and Environment (MME) in collaboration with Souq Waqif, concluded yesterday.
The Local Dates Festival was a big hit this year and more than 60,000 visitors from different nationalities visited the festival which ran from July 19 to August 4 at Souq Waqif.
“The festival offered fresh dates at affordable prices to visitors and more than 200 tonnes were sold during the festival days. The date varieties which remained at top in terms of sales were Khalas with over 118 tonnes of sales followed by Khanizi whose sale touched 32 tonnes,” a source at the Ministry of Municipality and Environment said.
The festival witnessed huge response yesterday (the last day of the event) from visitors who keened to take opportunity to buy fresh local dates at reasonable price. This year, the festival succeeded in increasing the number of local participating farms to 73 as compared to 57 farms last year.
Many dates varieties were available at the event among it Khalas, Khanizi, Barhi, and Shishi. The event is an initiative by the Ministry to support farms to display and market their products to people and also to help people of getting their needs of local fresh dates at law prices compared to the market.
It also aimed to know people about the varieties of locally produced dates and encourage them to invest in this sector to increase the local production of palm dates. The Ministry said: “The festival came in the framework of encouraging farmers to pay attention to the quality of dates and raise awareness among them on modern agriculture methods and care of palm trees.”
The percent of self-sufficiency of dates in Qatar is more than 80 percent while the total number of farms registered in the State of Qatar stands at 1,310, of which 916 are active farms, most of them grow palm trees and produce different types of dates.
