The competitiveness of the Saudi Arabian date palm: An analytical study

Abstract

The Kingdom’s date production has not kept pace with export activities, where the demand of foreigners as workers or visitors in KSA is increased from year to other, so as the percentage of exports is about 6.8% of the domestic production, which is equivalent to 8.7% of the global exports, moreover, the average price of export reached 1065 US$/ton. The low export price of Saudi dates is attributed to the lack of focus on the production of high quality varieties of dates. Only 6.8% of the production is marketed externally, this indicates that the Kingdom's exports to the world markets is very low although the Kingdom is the second largest producer of dates worldwide producing 14.1% of world production in 2010. The outcome of excess production of dates, low consumption and weak export activities and processing of Saudi dates, resulted in a large surplus of dates of about 400 thousand tons in 2010, and it is expected to exceed 600 thousand tons by the year 2022. This is considered as a waste of water resources as well as the financial resources of the Kingdom. To evaluate the level of competitiveness of dates in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries, the study used 3 main measures, that is, revealed comparative advantage (RCA), revealed trade advantage (RTA) and The trade entropy index (TEI), for the period 2000-2009. All the results showed that The KSA had revealed comparative advantage for export of dates. Key words: Gulf cooperation council (GCC), revealed comparative advantage, revealed trade advantage, trade entropy index.