Foreign consumers are making organic a veritable religion.
“It’s a whole culture in Europe and in the world. They have the culture of organic, products without any chemicals” confided to Ennahar TV last April Rachid Lakhnef the director of Biodattes, a company in Biskra.
Has the Algerian date sector underestimated the demand for organic products?
On the world market, among the most sought-after dates, those from Algeria take the lion’s share.
This is the case of the Deglet Nour variety. Except that batches would have been withdrawn from sale in France, in particular for pesticide levels above the tolerated standards. Local producers are taking a closer interest in organic.
In France, batches of dates withdrawn from sale
Like many date-producing countries, the Algerian sector seems to have discovered health controls.
In June, the French site Rappel.Conso advised not to consume Deglet Nour dates from Algeria and marketed under the Dat Vita brand on the grounds of the presence of sulfur dioxide, an allergen.
At the end of August it was the turn of batches of Deglet Nour dates under the “B&S La Pause” brand after detecting the presence of a pesticide banned in the European Union, diflubenzuron.
In Egypt and Iran, exporters experienced the same setbacks and banned chemicals from palm groves and warehouses.
National campaign to treat palm groves
In Biskra, the cradle of Deglet Nour production, Slimane Nadji, the director of the local section of the National Institute for Plant Protection (INPV), confided to El Watan, a few weeks before the 2021 harvest, that certain palm groves” are inaccessible to our [processing] vehicles, poorly maintained and dotted with pomegranate and fig trees that provide breeding grounds. »
He was also worried that farmers: “let things get worse and come in a rush to request interventions from INPV agents who are often at this precise moment on the ground to treat and protect the date regimes against the boufaroua and the moth.”
More than 2 million palm trees treated
For several years, a palm grove treatment program has been underway and in 2021 more than 2.5 million palm trees have been treated.
In the region of El Meghaïer, the damage linked to boufaroua is considerable. During the last campaign, this mite was the cause of a 60% reduction in date production.
According to the Ministry of Commerce, up to 77,000 tons of dates were exported in 2021 by Algeria. A job-creating activity in the south. Faced with the recent withdrawals of dates in France, the concern of producers and exporters is great.
Biological control, an obstacle course
Biological control is not easy to organize. Many pests are dependent on palm trees: fungus that causes bayoud, mite in the case of the boufaroua, bouguassas or rachis borer, white mealybug and borer. The corn borer worm has a nasty habit of dwelling in fruit.
For researchers from the Center for Scientific and Technical Research on Arid Regions (CRSTRA) and the University of Biskra, against these pests, the solution consists in finding natural enemies.
In each producing region, in order to inventory these auxiliary insects, the researchers have recourse to different means: traps filled with soapy water, butterfly net, yellow plates coated with glue or even “Japanese umbrella”: wooden frames fitted with a white cloth.
They collect insects falling from branches after they have been shaken.
Once the auxiliaries have been identified, it is a question of setting up farms in order to proceed with releases. It will be understood, this work cannot be improvised, it is a real obstacle course.
INPV, first steps in biological control
This type of release is effective. In Iran, the use of ladybugs attacking the date borer reduced the average number of parasites from 2.5 to 0.5 per date. In Tolga in 2017, the INPV released hundreds of individuals of Phanerotoma, a formidable enemy of the moth.
In Algeria, the first biological control trials date from the end of the 1970s. We owe them to Professors Salaheddine Doumandji and Bahia Doumandji Bahia of the National School of Agronomy of El Harrach who trained many specialists.
There are also preventive measures such as the elimination of weeds, desiccated palms or non-exploited date bunches which are all refuges for parasites. This is the case of the moth which overwinters in the grass at the foot of the palm trees.
Despite the existence of local specialists, biological control struggles to develop. One of the causes lies in the liberalization of pesticide imports, these products have gradually flooded the market.
Abroad, research is going well to get rid of chemicals, especially after harvest.
Sun tunnels using fans are an alternative to sulfur or methyl bromide fumigations. According to the designers of these tunnels, the temperature there reaches 50°C, which ensures the complete mortality of the insects.
As in Tunisia, there is local organic production. With 3,200 tons exported per year and 465 employees, the Biodattes company claims the first rank in the production of organic dates.
Producers and exporters, putting their hands in their pockets
Last year, date exports brought in $80 million to the industry.
Slimane Nadji confirms that producers “have palm groves from which they extract good annual dividends.
For the sector, the solution could involve the recruitment of qualified personnel responsible for ensuring its own production of beneficial insects.
As for seed traders, the challenge would be to reduce the sale of pesticides in favor of the sale of biological traps such as those based on pheromones.
