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By Badea Abu Al-Naja
MAKKAH — Saudi women pulled all the stops to showcase their produce in Al-Ahsa, becoming the most prominent shop at a two-week dates market in Al-Ahsa Dates Festival.
The fest “Dates are sweeter 2017” is being organized in collaboration with the Municipality of Al-Ahsa and Al-Ahsa Chamber of Commerce.
During the festival, dates can be sold on the sidewalks and farms until regulated markets are formed.
The date market platform offers more than 100 varieties of dates with an estimated turnover between four and five million riyals per day, according to market specialists. The offer is renewed almost daily. The specialists also confirmed that the size of the turnout at the individual purchase exceeds last year an increase of 48 percent. Economists estimated that the festival sales would exceed SR77 million.
Director of the King Abdullah City for dates Mohamed Al-Smaeel said that the festival has become a place for merchants to stop by and it has increased the sales remarkably wherein all big traders are competing with each other to raise the quality of their produce.
There are 41 factories participating in the festival, stressing the importance of laboratory quality-control of dates, which is the main attraction in the regulatory mechanism of the product in terms of dates, classification and sorting and identification of quality.
Al-Ahsa general supervisor Adel Al-Melhem pointed out the advanced and strategic goals achieved by the festival in five years. Dates were transformed from a popular agricultural product to the current economic trade product corresponding to the standards and specifications of qualitative production, which made Al-Ahsa dates becoming a popular demand not only locally but globally.
© The Saudi Gazette 2017
