The Ministry of Municipality plans to reform the agricultural sector by providing new tools and techniques to farmers for reducing their production costs, enabling them to compete with imported produce, said a top official.“The plan is to help local farms adopt more water-efficient farming system to address the problem of water shortage which is one of the major challenges,” said Director of Agricultural Affairs Department at the Ministry of Municipality, Yousef Khalid Al Khulaifi.Speaking to Qatar TV recently, he said that the solution for the water problem is to distribute irrigation network to local farms to rationalise water consumption and support them to establish water-efficient farming system like hydroponic.He said that increasing use of greenhouses and new techniques would also help to overcome the water problem. “The biggest challenge for us in Qatar like other countries in the region is water because we depend usually on groundwater for farming. Rain is main source of groundwater, which has been recorded less relatively in the past few years,” said Khulaifi.He said that the production cost of agricultural produce is high especially those produced in greenhouses.”The prices of fertilisers also increased about 100 percent during the past two years. This is why the Ministry of Municipality is supporting local farms to cut their production cost to compete in the market with imported produce,” said Khulaifi.He said that Qatar supported local farms with agricultural inputs including seeds, pesticide, fertilisers, greenhouses, irrigation network and marketing agricultural produce.“The Ministry of Municipality represented by the Agricultural Affairs Department in 2021 signed an agreement with Qatar University to conduct a survey,” said Khulaifi. He said that the agreement aimed at conducing agricultural census and a survey to assess the production cost of agricultural produce.“During about past five years, the production of agricultural produce has doubled and quality of the produce also improved significantly,” said Khulaifi.He said that Agricultural Affairs Department at the Ministry is supervising four marketing programmes – vegetables markets (yards for agricultural produce), Premium Products, Qatar Farm and Mahaseel— which contributed greatly to marketing of local agricultural produce.Khulaifi noted that with import of vegetables in large quantity during peak season prices of agricultural produce comes down in the market.“The suppliers need to focus on local produce, which covers a big portion of the demand especially during the peak season to stabilise the prices of vegetables, enabling local farmers to get reasonable price for their produce,” said Khulaifi.  (ICE Doha)

Fonte notizia: https://thepeninsulaqatar.com/