KABUL, Jan 12 (NNN-XINHUA) – Afghan farmers harvested 22 percent more saffron last year than in 2018, hoping the golden spice become a legitimate replacement to poppy opium, in the war-affected country.
This year’s saffron harvests, according to Afghans involved in saffron business, reached to over 19 tonnes, showing 22 percent increase, compared to only 16 tonnes in 2018.
“Statistics shows that farmers collected 19,469 kilograms of saffron in 2019, a 22 percent increase from over 37,500 hectares of cultivated lands, in different provinces of the country, highly expected to have up to 27 million U.S. dollars in income, this year,” Bashir Ahmad Rashidi, head of Afghanistan Saffron Planters National Union said.
China, India and the United Arab Emirates are the main customers of saffron from Afghanistan, Rashidi said.
However, he observed that, some companies export low or non-standard saffron to other countries, which is a blow to the reputation of the Afghan saffron at the global markets.
“We are still facing serious problems in standard packing and processing saffron, and we need standard machineries and devices to dry up saffron,” said Haji Abdul Shakor Rahimi, head of Nab group, a local saffron processing company.
Currently, the price of each kilogram of saffron is between 1,000 and 1,500 U.S. dollars at the world markets, with domestically vended 70,000 afghani (909 U.S. dollars), while the price could reach 3,000 U.S. dollars per kilogram, if producers receive enough support and cooperation from the government and related agencies, Rahimi maintained.
Balkh and Sar-e-Pul in the country’s north, Kandahar and Uruzgan in the south and Dykundi in the centre have most of saffron farmlands, after Herat in the west, with up to 92 percent of total saffron production in 2019.
Promotion of the valuable crop has created jobs for thousands of people, including women, and improved their economic situation in many Afghan provinces.
