Dates

Los Angeles Times

A Destiny With Dates
*
Iraq’s economy was long intertwined with the fruit of the palm tree,
and its crop was the envy of the world. But then came Hussein.

ABU
AL KHASIB, Iraq — In the basin of the Shatt al Arab waterway, it’s 90
degrees at dawn and rising. They call these midsummer weeks in southern
Iraq the palm oven days because it’s in the intense heat of July that
the sweetness of autumn is made — the dates cook, the sugars burn and
the flavor cures.

Kamal Ayoob Khaleel, one man alone against an
orchard of a couple of hundred trees, has this day begun the year’s date
palm harvest, the first of the post-Saddam Hussein era.

Hussein’s rule was so complete even the dates felt his wrath.

In
good times, the date harvest was eagerly awaited throughout the Middle
East, and the arrival of the first dates, like the arrival of the first
Beaujolais, was a time of high excitement.

But like so much else
in Iraqi life, the business of dates was fundamentally altered for the
worse during Hussein’s rule. The president, not always satisfied with
merely executing or exiling his perceived enemies, also on occasion
attacked their livelihoods. As part of his continuing feud with the
Shiite Muslims who populate much of southern Iraq, where the main date
harvest occurs, Hussein attacked the trees.

Iraqis like to say,
with irony but no evident anger, that Hussein executed trees. In
addition to simply chopping them down, he drained the swamps that gave
them water. Drought further reduced the water supply and raised the
salinity of what was left — a double disaster.

Of the 9 million
trees in Basra province, 6 million were destroyed. Overall, the country
lost half its 30 million trees in 20 years. What had been the largest
date industry in the world — so esteemed that its varieties were
planted as far away as California’s Coachella Valley — declined in
economic importance, making the trees less valuable and then, deepening
the cycle of decline, less cared for.

The entirety of the
country’s most valuable agricultural inheritance was at risk, said Dr.
Abbas Jasim, director of the Date Palm Research Center at the University
of Basra. Jasim did his postgraduate work at Kansas State University
and saw there the effort by agronomists to preserve the genetic
endowment of different crops by building tissue libraries. When he
returned to Iraq in the early 1990s, he began creating such a library
for palms. Because there are hundreds of varieties (including some so
prized and expensive that most Iraqis have never tasted them), it was
not an easy undertaking.

When Jasim eventually finished the
library, he had samples of every palm native to Iraq growing in his lab.
His timing was good. International sanctions had wrecked much of the
country’s economy, and people were returning to the date orchards. They
needed new stocks for replanting, and he provided them. The lab
attracted new students, and the industry seemed set to rebound.

Then came the latest war.

The rampage that followed the fall of the Hussein government engulfed the university. The palm lab was no exception.

“Just destruction for the sake of destruction,” Jasim said.

Looters
stole everything — office furniture, air conditioners, even the
autoclaves used in growing cell cultures. They dumped chemicals on the
floor, smashed thousands of test tubes.

The theft of the air
conditioners was the fatal blow. Once the temperature climbed above 90
degrees in the lab, everything that wasn’t stolen or broken died. Not a
single tissue culture survived.

*

Khaleel, the date farmer,
has more immediate concerns than the date palm genetic database. The
capriciousness of farm life is evident on the ground at the base of his
trees, where the remains of a field of okra sit gray and shrunken. There
hasn’t been enough water to irrigate, and what little there is is so
salty it actually killed some of the plants.

Khaleel, 40, was one
of many people who came back to the date orchards as a sort of economic
refugee, hoping to raise enough food to feed and clothe his family. He
doesn’t own any land, instead leasing his plots for a percentage of the
harvest.

Most of his fruit is not yet ready for market, but it’s
worth finding that which is, because the early fruit gets five times the
price of the later harvest. The fruit is given different names as it
ages: khalal, rutab, tamr. It’s edible at all stages; it’s just not a
date until the end.

The date has a place at the center of its
native culture that has been achieved by few other foods — rice in
Japan, perhaps, or tortillas in Mexico. Its praises have been sung over
the millenniums, beginning with the Assyrians 5,000 years ago. It is
mentioned more often in the Koran — 29 times — than many of the
prophets. The dates became and remain the preferred food to end the
daily fasts of Ramadan. Arab women eat them during pregnancy for
nutrition and during labor for relief.

Mary ate dates to relieve
the pain of giving birth to Jesus. According to the Koran’s account, the
tree was so beneficent that she didn’t even have to pick the fruit.
“Shake towards thyself the trunk of the palm tree,” she was told. “It
will let fall fresh, ripe dates upon thee.”

In real life, it’s not that easy.

Many
of the trees are 100 feet tall, and shaking them appears to have little
effect, which explains why Khaleel is at the moment higher than some
birds. He’s parked 60 feet up in a metal rope and fabric sling, an air
chair, in which he sits at a nearly perfect 45-degree angle from the
trunk of the tree. He makes no evident effort to stay seated; gravity
and the angle and weight of his body against the sling are all he needs
to be secured. He might as well be sitting on a porch swing.

A
tree can produce as much as a ton of fruit a year. The dates hang in as
many as 20 large bunches, hundreds of dates per bunch. Although the
trees fruit only once a season, the harvest lasts for months as the
fruit ripens at varying speeds depending on where it is in the bunch.
The center of the bunch, where it’s warmest and most humid, ripens
first, so the dates must be picked from the inside out.

They’re
not actually picked, but twisted off so as not to disturb the branch and
the fruit left behind. Just touching the fruit leaves a trace of acid
and a slight blemish. So the prey must be approached carefully, reaching
into the middle of the bunch, touching nothing but the target dates.

The
picker must come straight in; if he sweeps in from the side he risks
the knife-sharp points of the palm fronds. Every approach is a chance
for multiple stab wounds. A cat burglar couldn’t be more careful.

The
soft, angled light of early morning hasn’t lasted long, turning hard in
a hurry. It punishes, and by 9 a.m. it will be too hot to do much more
than breathe. Khaleel will break, tend to other chores, then return in
the evening.

He is barefoot and unhurried. He slides up and down
the tree by easing his weight away from the sling and walking on the
rough bark. He has a cloth satchel looped around his neck, resting on
his stomach. He picks and deposits into the sack, then dumps the results
on the ground. A boy from the market will come by and collect it at
day’s end.

The war did some damage to the palms, but compared with
the rest of the country it was slight. Just down the road, Mohammed
Jasin Khaleel, owner of a large date orchard, points to where his trees
got trimmed by machine-gun fire in a fight on the nearby road. Some
unexploded ordnance was left in the deep grass.

There are other
problems. Even when water is available, Khaleel, who is not related to
the date farmer, needs electricity to drive the pumps to irrigate his
trees. Power isn’t always available off the grid. He has a generator to
fill in the gaps, but fuel for it is sometimes hard to come by.

Mohammed
Khaleel no longer climbs the trees himself. He has retired to
management, and from the look of him, this occurred more than a few
years ago.

He has a crew of students and ex-students who’ve been
picking for him for most of a decade. Pick today, take tests at the
university — or what’s left of it — tomorrow, they said. Workers must
pick two boxes of fruit a day to earn their wages. There is a casualness
to the whole enterprise. No rush or pressure.

Mazin Abbou, one of
the students, is only 15 years old and already is in his fourth year in
the palms. “As soon as you get used to it, it’s easy,” he said.
Shoeless, capless, lithe and tousled, he hasn’t learned yet that this is
work and wants to climb the tallest trees, which he does in a scamper.

Up
in another tree sits an old man, grayed and scrawny and slightly
unkempt. He’s a pensioner who has come out to harvest because he likes
it. He waves and smiles from his perch.

Go virtually anywhere in
Iraq today, and people can be seen milling about. These aren’t vagrants,
but often anxious middle-class wage earners. They’re waiting, wondering
what to do and when they can do it. There’s a group of people like that
at Abbas Jasim’s lab in Basra — fellow professors, lab technicians and
students, several of whom lost all the work for their dissertations
when the place was ransacked.

The lab is full of broken glass and
ancient office furniture that has been scrounged to replace what was
stolen. The loss of the facility will hurt the Iraqi date industry more
in the long term than the short, in the loss of its science more than
its trees. With or without the lab, trees planted now will take on
average a decade to reach maturity.

Jasim said he would try to
find the money to rebuild not just the lab but also the large part of
his life that went with it. It will take time. He met recently with
Americans who control the money for Iraq’s reconstruction. He said he
couldn’t tell where dates fell on their priority list, but he hadn’t
heard back. He’s waiting.

Outside, even the trees lining the drive to the research center have been taken. These went later, long after the looting.

People
have gone scavenging for wood because liquefied petroleum gas, with
which they cook, is in short supply after saboteurs damaged the
refineries.

Every single tree on the road has been reduced to a stump, yet another of the war’s still widening ripples.