A review of Jewish National Fund activities in the period since the last World Zionist Congress, made public at a press conference here today, disclosed that the organization’s holdings now constitute 17 percent of the state’s territory and 66 percent of its cultivated land. The survey showed that in 1951 and 1953, the Government of Israel sold the JNF 3,300,000 dunams of abandoned land, that it acquired an additional 56,000 dunams directly from private owners–mostly non-Jews, and that its total land holdings now-amount to 3,500,000 dunams.
It was also revealed that 583 of Israel’s 728 settlements are established on the organization’s land and that 75 percent of the entire agricultural production of this country is derived from JNF lands. In the period covered by the report, the organization improved 108,000 dunams of land-bringing land improvement up to a total of 188,300 dunams since the group’s inception. Eighteen million trees have been planted since the establishment of the State, part of the overall plantation of 30,000,000 trees covering 131,000 dunams since the organization’s beginning.
The survey indicated that the completion of the Huleh project would convert some 60,000 dunams of marshes into arable land and make possible the exploitation of some 100,000,000 cubic meters of water for irrigation purposes each year. The JNF had received $52,000,000 in loans from the State of Israel since 1949, it was disclosed, of which $42,000,000 had been repaid. During the same period, the Jewish National Fund invested 36,000,000 pounds.
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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.
