Harvesting olives in West Bank

 

Dura Al Qari’a / DPA

Plastic tarps on the ground are slowly filling up with green and black olives. Imad Hasan, clad in a blue pullover, a cap and jogging pants, is standing on a metal ladder five metres above the ground, picking the olives by hand from the tree, the ripe fruit nestled between narrow pointed leaves.
Down below, his mother Fatima is sitting on the ground, examining each olive. The green ones she sets aside for being pickled. The others go immediately into the oil press.
The setting is Dura Al Qari’a, a West Bank town of 3,000 Palestinians a few kilometres north of Ramallah.
Hasan cultivates a total of 19 olive trees across 2.5 hectares. The olives are merely a bit of income on the side in addition to his employment in the Economics Ministry archives.
From up on his ladder, he points to the black olives down on the red earth. “They have all already dropped off,” Hasan says.
He had been unable to take off from work sooner, and so now he and his family were harvesting the 19 trees in a single week.
But, the 39-year-old is satisfied with the harvest: “This year is better than last year,” he says. Only every second year do the trees yield a lot of olives. Last year, the pickings were thin.
The olive harvest that takes place around mid-October to mid-November is the most important time of year for Palestinian agriculture. The Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Agriculture reports that the livelihood of around 100,000 families depends on the olive harvest, which itself accounts for about 25 per cent of total earnings in the Palestinian agricultural sector.
The ministry was projecting a harvest of around 100,000 tons of olives. This would be an average yield. From these, upwards of 17,000 tons of olive oil can be produced, Agriculture Minister Sufian Sultan reported in Bethlehem.
“The season is not like we
expected it,” says Majed Naser of the Union of Agriculture Work Committees in Ramallah, a non-governmental organization helping the Palestinian farm sector. “It is below average,” Naser says, with his group projecting a final output of 15,000 tons of olive oil.
During the flowering time last spring, the weather was too cool, and then the summer was too dry.
Only a small amount of the Palestinian olive harvest gets exported. Cogat, the Israeli authority coordinating activities in the Palestinian Territories, put last year’s harvest at just 3,750 tons. The olives are chiefly exported to the Gulf region through Jordan.
The modest figures belie the deep psychological importance that olives have for the Palestinians. To them, the olive tree is a symbol of peace and of their attachment to the land.
Besides olive oil, they can make soap from the fruit, and medicinal remedies from the leaves. The wood can be carved to produce souvenirs.
The weather is not the only worry for the West Bank farmers. Over and over there are reports of Israeli settlers coming to steal the olives or damage the trees. Imad Hasan’s sister Randa and her family own trees near the Bet El settlement.
“We are not allowed to go there just on our own,” the 49-year-old woman says. First they must get approval from the local authorities. Only when the Israelis give the green light can they go to harvest the olives – accompanied by Cogat workers.
Cogat simply notes that during the harvest period there are frequent conflicts.
Hasan is hoping to produce 112 kilograms of oil this time around. This would be worth around 1,200 dollars – more than what an average worker earns in two months.
Because the overall harvest is lower, he might even be able to sell his oil at a higher price than last year, he says.