Kerman Orchards Suffer Nearly $400m in Losses
EghtesadOnline: Cold spell on April 6-8 as well as frost in January and February have caused 94 trillion rials ($397 million) in damage to orchards in Kerman Province.
“Temperatures went below minus 5 degrees Celsius, which caused losses of between 20-80% to 170,650 hectares of pistachio orchards in the province, causing damage to 53,822 tons of the crop. Kerman has around 212,000 hectares of pistachio orchards, so a big part of this year’s harvest is gone,” Abbas Saeidi, the head of Kerman Agricultural Organization, was quoted as saying by IRNA.
The official noted that 7,157 hectares of Kerman’s walnut orchards were also damaged in the frost, causing a loss of nearly 8,000 tons of the crop.
Around 2,400 hectares of damask rose orchards also suffered losses of between 30-100%.
Kerman Province in southeast Iran is the country’s pistachio production hub.
Fresh and dried pistachio topped the list of agricultural exports from Iran in terms of value, as the country exported $920 million worth of the crop during the first 10 months of last fiscal year (March 2020-21), latest data released by the Agriculture Ministry shows.