ABADAN, Khuzestan Prov. – A delegation of directors from a South African company toured this southern Iranian port city on Thursday to discuss the possibility of investing in the Arvand Free Trade Zone and the Abadan Industrial Park.

The company, Duvalco, is a supplier of automatic water drain and mechanical shut-off diesel filtration systems. The delegation discussed the quality of local transport facilities, customs duties, and working conditions for foreigners with the city officials. Duvalco has already established a branch in Saudi Arabia.

Industrialist calls for construction of date-processing factories

BUSHEHR – An industrialist called here Thursday for a major change in the government’s attitude towards the guarantee purchase of agricultural products like dates, saying that some 400 billion rials (nearly $43.33 million) is spent annually on guarantee purchasing of dates.

“This is quite unreasonable to spend this big amount of money on buying dates from farmers while you can create 700 jobs by building just one date processing plant,” the director of the Bushehr Industrial Group Ali Musavi said. He put the annual date surplus in the country at 300-550 thousand tons, suggesting that the government could urge all organizations across the country to use this surplus as a substitute for sugar and therefore cut its annual 800,000-ton import of sugar.

Annual afforestation in Golestan reaches 4,000 ha

GORGAN, Golestan Prov. – The annual afforestation in this northern Iranian province reaches 4,000 hectares, the provincial Natural Resources Department has averaged out.

This accounts for 60% of the total afforestation in the northern provinces of Iran, including Golestan, Mazandaran and Gilan, the department announced. However, larges areas of these northern forests – 142,000 hectares every year – are destroyed, mainly for industrial purposes, damaging the regional ecosystems as well as the lives of millions of locals. Iran ranks tenth in the Asia-Pacific region in terms of deforestation. Once covering almost 300,000 hectares of lands northwest of Iran, the Arasbaran Forests have now shrunk to less than 164,000 hectares.

Trade at Mahshahr port hits 9.83m tons

AHVAZ, Khuzestan Prov. – The loading and unloading of goods at the southern Iranian port of Mahshahr totaled almost 9.839 million tons during the first ten months of the current Iranian year (started March 21, 2006).

Exports (loading) comprised more than 8.38 million tons of the volume, showing 10 percent increase compared to the same period last year. According to the Khuzestan Ports and Shipping Department, the total volume of stevedoring at the two other major ports of this province, Abadan and Khorramshahr, reached 950,970 tons in the same period.

RAI chief pessimistic about achieving self-sufficiency in rice by 2010

TEHRAN – The government’s plan to achieve self-sufficiency in rice is not a complicated matter at all, but it takes a lot of effort to be done by the relevant officials, said the director of the Rice Association of Iran on Thursday, predicting that the plan would not be completed in the stated period (three years).

“Three things should be done to achieve this goal: reducing rice production costs, promoting the cultivation of high-yielding varieties, and promoting agricultural mechanization across the country,” Jamil Shayeq stated, noting that there has been no progress in the project so far.