With its mild coastal weather and well-drained soil, the Gaza Strip is an ideal location for commercial flower farming. There are hundreds of small flowers farms across the Gaza Strip, and they employ thousands of workers.
According to the Palestinian Union of Agricultural Work Committees (UAWC) there used to be over 500 dunams (acres) of carnations planted in the Gaza Strip, but since the beginning of the siege in 2007, flower exports have plummeted year on year and there are only around 60 dunams left.
Between the early 1990s and 2000s, a floral industry, which was encouraged by European donor states, was booming in Gaza. This costly industry requires a significant amount of water and electricity, which is controlled by Israel.
Over 40 million flowers were sold every year to European markets, especially Holland, mainly to Christmas and Valentine's Day consumers. However, the adverse conditions facing this industry since 2008 are bringing it close to collapse.
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The planted land used to produce over forty million stems for export, but now the few carnation farmers who are left are struggling to sell 5-10 million.
Farmers Suffering
Iyad Hejazy, a long-time flower farmer from the southern Gaza Strip city of Rafah, has faced much adversity to maintain his crop.
“I have exerted a relentless effort over the past few months and been charged a lot of funds in order to take care of my flowers. Yet this season has been the worst because of last summer's Israeli war on the territory,” Hejazy tells OnIslam.net.
Standing amidst some grown flowers inside his greenhouse farm, Hejazy recalles, “During the 51-day Israeli war on Gaza, I could not reach my farmland to irrigate the flowers and this had caused most of my flowers to die .”
Another flower farmer and one of Gaza's key flower traders says he lost hundreds of thousands of US dollars due to the last Israeli invasion of Gaza.
“Along with my great financial losses, I was inflicted a much greater loss because of that war. My entire family of 13 members were all killed after an Israeli aircraft pounded the family home. My family and I have worked in flower farming for decades. Now everything has gone,” says Ayman Siyam, while bending down to farm his land in the southern city of Rafah.
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Siyam says he used to plant an area of 25 acres with flowers. But due to border closures, lack of support from European donors to the flower farming sector, as well as frequent Israeli army attacks on the Gaza Strip, he had to reduce the size of his farmland to only one acre.
“More than 240 flower farmers here in the territory have recently stopped planting flowers, replacing them with vegetables such as tomatoes and peppers. But I am determined to continue planting my own little farmland with flowers in the hope of at least meeting the need of our local market,” says Siyam.
According to the Agricultural Cooperative Society of the town of Beit Lahya in northern Gaza, the inability of Gaza farmers to reach their farmlands during the 51-day Israeli invasion of Gaza caused tens of thousands of plants, including flowers, to die.
“During the past few years, the size of farmlands planted with flowers has been largely reduced from 250 acres in early 2000 to only one acre in 2015, causing 2500 workers to become jobless,” says Ghassan Qasem of the Agricultural Cooperative Society.
Qasem points out that flower farming in Gaza needs genuine support from concerned bodies, such as the Gazan ministry of agriculture and the European Union.
Director general of marketing and border crossings with the Gaza-based ministry of agriculture, Tahseen Elsaqa, tells OnIslam.net that frequent closures of Gaza's sole commercial crossing, Kerem Shalom in southern Gaza, in addition to a shortage in Dutch support to Gaza farmers have caused Gaza farmers to stop farming flowers.
“The Dutch government in particular used to support each flower farmer in Gaza with 12,000 US dollars per acre. This season, the financial support was reduced to only 2,800 US dollars,” he says.
Elsaqa says that the majority of flower farmers have begun farming vegetables instead of flowers.
“The Israeli occupation allows us to export a small quantity of produce, just to show the world that they are nice to the Palestinians, but they are using us. Everything we do is controlled by them” Saad Ziada, Union of Agricultural Work Committees
