DATE PALMS FOR INDIA

Press, Volume XCIX, Issue 29177, 11 April 1960, Page 17

DATE PALMS FOR INDIA

Shipment of ‘Offshoots’

Leaves U.S.

A shipment of 200 date palm tree “offshoots” loaded at the port of Los Angeles recently may enable India to become selfsufficient in this fruit. The Rockefeller Foundation, which is sending the shipment to the Indian Council of Agricultural Research in New Delhi, obtained the offshoots from the University of Arizona —most of them coming from the Yuma experimental station of the university. A small number came from nurseries at Indio, the centre of California’s date producing area. The foundation’s .grant of dollars to cover packing and transportation was small, compared with many of its grants. In the past its efforts to improve agricultural output in India and other areas have always been concentrated in the more basic foodstuffs, such as corn, wheat and rice.

To the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, the production of dates, if not essential to basic needs, is extremely important in the country’s continuing fight to cut down on food imports. In the first nine months of 1959, India imported more than 759,0001 b df dates.

India’s failure to increase her production of dates substantially has been lack of offshoots of proved good stock for an intensive experimental programme. The council took this problem to the Rockefeller Foundation’s staff of agricultural experts in New Delhi, which passed the request on to the foundation’s headquarters in New York. The offshoots—which grow from the roots of the palms, often several feet from the parent plants —were scientifically selected. To ensure their arrival in first class condition, each offshoot, measuring about 6 feet in height, was individually wrapped. They are being kept in a refrigerated compartment of the ship with the temperature held at 38deg. during the voyage. On their arrival in New Delhi, the offshoots will be planted. Those which appear best adapted to the climate, rainfall, soil and other conditions of the date producing areas of India will be selected as basic stock. This stock will then be used in a breeding and multiplication programme through which the council hopes to improve the quality and quantity of date production sufficiently to fill the domestic demand.