Dates Processing

Dates Processing

The statistics of lands used for cultivating and producing Date from 1981 to 1999:

Subject	1981	1999	Overall increase	Yearly increase
Hectares of lands under cultivation	65250	217765	334%	13%
Date production(tons)	231523	918131	397%	16.5%
Date produced(ton/ hectare)	3883	5190	33%	1.87%

Looking through Date commercial information from 1981 to 1999:

Iran with exporting 12426 tons of date was the third country in the world after S. Arabia and Iraq in 1981 but upgraded to the first position with exporting 134508.2 tons in 1994.

Unfortunately, Iran ranks the last from the point of price value increase. Date was sold 0.2 dollars per kg at the beginning and 50% decrease in observed from 1994 to 1998; as Date export has been estimated 51050.9 tons.

It is to be mentioned that the trend has increased to 58156.6 tons in 1999..

Date packaging and processing potentialities today:

As far as, we have a yearly production of 950.000 tons, processing units in the country could apply about 400.000 tons.

According to the statistics of the ministry of industry, only 17 certified units are working with 22630 tons of production. And there are 3 units with 6150 tons capacity, establishment certificates and installed machineries, which have not started working yet.

121 units with establishment certificates and 444890 tons capacity are ready for producing Date juice and packaging.

According to FAO,

Subjects	World	Iran	Iran/ world	Rank
Hectares of lands under cultivation in 1997	787.908	175.000	22%	1st
Date production in 1997(ton)	462.6130 tons	877.000	19%	1st
Date produced in 1 hectare	5897	5027	85%	Egypt 1st
Export in 1996	322.129	100.000
Export revenue in 1996($)	788.370	40.000

Necessity of establishing Date, sugar industries (Date juice & Date liquid):

877.000 tons of Date is produced in the country each year, which 520.000 tons is surplus and could be used in processing industries.

Sugar production of the country is about 640.000 and its consumption is 1.550.000 tons a year. Thus, 900.000 tons of sugar should be imported each year.

Date surplus production could be processed to 312.000 tons of liquid sugar (date liquid or Date juice), and this is as much as one third of the imported sugar.

Producing a kg Date liquid has 1400 Rials expenditure and 1 kg sugar is sold 2200 Rials without transportation cost.

1 ton of imported sugar costs 290 $ (1750 Rials per dollar) and 1 ton of Date liquid is 500-600 $ in the world market.

Hence, summing each ton as 500 $, we would save 56 million dollars.

Date liquid could be used in making sweets, beverages, ice cream, chocolate, and etc. because of having fructose and being natural