Citrus farmers in the city of Jisr al-Shughur in western Idlib countryside are facing a severe marketing crisis, resulting from falling selling prices and rising production, harvesting, and transportation costs, making marketing the crop economically unviable and pushing some to leave the fruits on the trees. This cultivation is concentrated in the village of Bakfala and includes local lemons, Abu Sura oranges, and tangerines, in addition to limited quantities of avocados, forming an important source of income in the region.
The head of the Jisr al-Shughur Agriculture Department, Ridwan Rafat Akrama, told the Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) on Monday that the cultivated area of citrus amounts to about 1,500 dunams, comprising nearly 40,000 trees, with an expected production ranging between 4,000 and 5,000 tons this season. He pointed out that the sector faces agricultural challenges, the most prominent being frost during March and April, which causes the loss of about 50 percent of flowers, and the drying up of the Orontes River in summer and its impact on irrigation, as well as the spread of fruit flies and insects.
For his part, Akrama attributed the price decline to the absence of storage refrigerators, forcing farmers to offer the crop all at once in the wholesale market, increasing supply and driving prices down. He proposed marketing production directly from the farm to the consumer to avoid the wholesale market commission, and establishing juice factories and utilizing citrus peels in food and pharmaceutical industries. He also called for the establishment of professional associations to receive and market the crop without intermediaries, organize harvesting in stages, and set up field schools in cooperation with the Ministry of Agriculture and the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO).
Farmers Ali Salmaoui and Abdou Salmaoui from Bakfala village noted that falling prices, alongside rising labor, transportation, and empty container costs, make selling the crop economically unviable. They called for reopening export markets to Jordan and Iraq, and securing fuels to support farmers, warning that continued losses may drive residents to uproot citrus trees and switch to other crops.
Source: Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA)
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