Dear Friends,
Last month Jayyous farmers let their crop of lemons rot, for the last three weeks the tomato harvest is laying unpicked. Today most of farmers in Jayyous announced to people “go and get tomato form the green houses for free”.
The reason for the farmers’ strange behaviour?
In Jayyous there are around 80 green houses and 400 dunum of open crops, and most of them are cultivated with tomato. The average annual product of green house is 30,000kg (30 tons). The farmers could sell one box of tomatoes or 15kg for 30 cents in the local market. While the cost of growing one box of tomatoes is $3.5!
No traders can come from the main cities to collect the harvest from the area behind the wall due to lack of permits. There is no possibility to send any produce to the Israeli market.
In addition to that, yesterday the bulldozers started cutting the olive trees adjacent to the eastern side of the wall close to gate 24.
All the best,
Abdul Latif