In greenhouses and sterile laboratories west of Basra, Iraqi technicians wearing
gloves and masks lift tiny date palm shoots from jars, hoping one day to restore orchards laid waste by decades of war, land loss and creeping water salinity.
Date palms, once central to Iraq’s agricultural economy, have been ravaged by the upstream damming of the Tigris and Euphrates, declining rainfall, seawater intrusion and decades of conflict.
In a private-sector push, scientists and officials are now scaling up tissue-culture propagation to produce disease-free date palm saplings and preserve rare Iraqi varieties.
“Tissue-culture agriculture is distinguished mainly by its high production,” said Mohammed Abdulrazzaq, director of Nakheel Al Basra. “In previous methods, a palm tree could give you three to four offshoots, but with tissue culture, we can produce
thousands of offshoots from a single palm.”
Nakheel Al Basra, one of the province’s largest tissue-culture laboratories, began operations in 2023 and can produce up to 250,000 palm seedlings a year, said Abdulrazzaq, adding that tissue-culture palms have a success rate of up to 99%.
Inside the laboratory, workers use masks and gloves when handling palm samples to limit contamination. Tiny shoots are kept in jars on racks and moved through stages designed to produce uniform, disease-free planting material.
Abdulrazzaq said wars, the bulldozing of farmland and rising water salinity had pushed some Iraqi date varieties to “the verge of extinction.”
Iraq’s water security has become a pressing issue as levels in the Euphrates and Tigris have fallen sharply, compounded by upstream dams, mainly in Turkey.
In Shatt al-Arab, the drop has allowed seawater from the Gulf to push further inland, driving salinity to unprecedented levels, which farmers describe as an advancing “saline tongue” in their water supplies.
Basra alone once had 13 million palm trees out of 32 million across Iraq, said Dr. Jassim Mohammed, head of the agriculture department at Basra’s Directorate of Agriculture, but the number has since fallen sharply.
