New Stories From 'Urban Agriculture Notes'
Random header image... Refresh for more!

Egypt: Sunflowers change farmers’ fortunes in central Egypt city

Sunflower growing in the central Egyptian province of Fayoum brings economic hope to farmers and contributes to reducing an exorbitant vegetable oil import bill.

By Amr Emam
AI Monitor
Aug 27, 2021

Excerpt:

Farmer Saeed Saber’s financial prospects had been worrisome in the past. However, a few months ago, his neighbor advised him to scrap rice and grow sunflowers instead in his 10-acre farm in the central province of Fayoum, 116 kilometers (72 miles) southwest of the capital Cairo.

Almost 2½ months after sowing the first sunflower seeds, Saber’s economic fortunes are changing rapidly.

“The sunflowers are changing my life and the lives of all the farmers growing this crop,” Saber told Al-Monitor. “The flowers are bringing in a lot of money.”

Sunflower growing is changing the fortunes of farmers in Fayoum, bringing hope to the agricultural sector in the city and creating employment for thousands of farmland workers who were about to desert farming altogether.

The plant is lucrative to cultivate and takes a lot less effort to grow than other crops. It brings in assured income for Fayoum’s farmers and landowners.

An acre of farmland produces around 2 tons of sunflowers, and it takes the flowers about 80 days to grow and ripen.

Fayoum farmers can grow the sunflowers twice annually between May and August, thanks to proper weather conditions at that time of the year.

Soon after they harvest the sunflowers, the farmers deliver the output to the government and the private sector waiting eagerly to take the produce.

“The clients are always ready to buy the produce from the farmers,” Rabie Abdel Gelil, agriculture chief in Fayoum, told Al-Monitor. “The farmers also compete to increase the productivity of their fields.”

At the same time, Egypt is making efforts to increase its vegetable oil production in the hope to reduce the exorbitant cooking oil import bill.

The populous country consumes around 2.6 million tons of vegetable oils annually, whereas it produces 500,000 tons of these oils only.

This forces Cairo to pay billions of dollars for the imports every year, creating additional pressure on the embattled national budget.

Vegetable oils are among the nation’s top import items, together with corn, wheat and cotton.

To increase the production of cooking oils, agricultural authorities in Cairo encourage the cultivation of oil crops.

Read the complete article here.