The Israel Government has leased 22,000 dunams (5,500 acres) to a privately organized stock company for the development of citrus groves. The backers of the company include some of the largest grove owners in the country.
The company, known as Mehadrin, will begin operations with an initial capitalization of 500,000 pounds. It has received a 49-year lease, with an option to renew for another 49 years. The government has also agreed to allocate further lands, up to a total of 60,000 dunams, to the company after it has developed the lands already leased to it. The government also plans to grant a maximum of 40,000 dunams to workers and middle class cooperatives for the development of citrus fruit production.
The formation of the private stock company is part of a plan by some of the leading private fruit growers to increase the total acreage under cultivation and to convert the major portion of the industry to groves which can be tended with the aid of machinery. Among the factors leading to the decline of Israel’s citrus growing industry is that many of the groves were set up too close to growing communities and have since been converted to more profitable real estate. In addition, the earlier groves were planted too densely, because it was planned to cultivate them by hand. Now, however, it has become too expensive to cultivate them by hand and mechanically difficult to cultivate them by machinery.
Government and private growers plans aim to increase the yield of the country’s citrus industry to 12,000,000 crates annually. Last year’s crop was 8,250,000 crates, of which 4,500,000 were exported. Long-term plans foresee the possibility of planting 300,000 dunams–currently 130,000 dunams are under citrus cultivation–and harvesting 22,000,000 crates worth of fruit annually.
The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
