REPEAT AFTER ME: FRUITFUL SCIENCE OF CLONING DATES
▶ Away from the fun of the annual festival is the serious business of reproduction. Daniel Bardsley reports
The date palm has been a key source of food in the Arabian Gulf for more than 5,000 years and its role in providing sustenance shows no sign of fading. Each year tens of thousands of people attend the Liwa Date Festival, which runs until Saturday, but many would not know the vital role the UAE plays in cloning date palms by tissue culture.
While there are other ways of propagating date palms, only sophisticated laboratory techniques can produce the tens of thousands of genetically identical plants needed by the date-growing industry each year.
Among the few companies able to propagate date palms on an industrial scale is Al Wathba Marionnet, an Emirati-French company based in Abu Dhabi, with tissue-culture laboratories and greenhouses at Al Khazna, between the capital and Al Ain.
“Tissue culture will get rid of any disease and give you the capability to produce in high quantities. There’s no other choice,” said Franck Marionnet, the company’s general manager.
Other companies involved in the business include Green Coast Nurseries in Fujairah, which collaborates with a UK company, Date Palm Developments.
It has tissue-culture laboratories in south-west England.
UAE University also has such a laboratory, which propagates date palms and sells them.
The story of how the country became a global centre for this business is one of great foresight, and the vision of Sheikh Zayed, the Founding Father.
From the late 1990s, authorities offered tenders for companies to supply thousands of tissue-cultured date palms, said Buthaina Khazal, managing partner of Green Coast Nurseries. These plants were passed on to farmers.
Mrs Khazal said support from Sheikh Zayed was key to the technology’s adoption. But even now, the techniques are problematic.
“Date palms were one of the last things scientists worked on with tissue culture, and the most difficult,” Mrs Khazal said.
Mr Marionnet described the use of tissue culture as “very, very specific” and something that few laboratories were able to carry out successfully.
“So many started and closed; they cannot succeed,” he said. “If you’re producing strawberries, it’s very easy. Technically with date palms it’s very, very difficult. Every day we have failures and successes.
“We keep improving all the time but we haven’t had the ideal production capability and ideal ease of production.”
Like other flowering plants, date palms can reproduce by seed. But because these seeds are created by mixing the genetic material of a male and female plant, they vary from one to another, so the resulting plants may not be consistent in yield of dates or other characteristics.
And it is just female date palms that produce dates, so farmers do not want to waste time and resources growing plants only to find they are male.
As an alternative, female plants can be cloned, generating offspring genetically identical to the parent. One method involves taking offshoots, which are small versions of the plant that grow out from the base of the trunk, and growing them into trees.
“When you have a big tree, you have a small one growing from its foot. This one you can take, it will be exactly the same,” said Mr Marionnet.
“Within the lifespan of one adult tree, it will produce 10 to 15 daughters but it’s not enough to supply the demand.”
Also, if the mother plant has a disease, a daughter plant grown from an offshoot will have the same condition. Mr Marionnet said only about 60 per cent of offshoots grew successfully.
So instead, tissue culture, which involves taking tiny pieces of plant derived from offshoots and growing them under laboratory conditions, is used.
The Marionnet family, whose agricultural company in France has been going for more than a century, set Al Wathba Marionnet up with an Emirati partner in 1998 because the UAE is a key market for date palms.
They employ 35 people, most in the laboratories and greenhouses, and produce 200,000 to 250,000 date palms a year, many of which are exported to India, Pakistan, Central America, Africa and many Middle East countries.
Green Coast Nurseries, which also exports around the world, has an 86-hectare nursery where it grows more than 100,000 plants a year, including types other than the date palm, such as the Listona fan palm.
The company also has a large date farm.
Mrs Khazal said early varieties of date palm produce fruits from June onwards and the harvesting season runs until October.
“Most varieties come mid-season – June, July, August. Right now at our farm you will see an army of people. They work early morning and in the afternoon,” she said.
The date palm industry has methods to ripen dates in storage, allowing them to be harvested early.
Other countries to have date palm tissue culture centres include Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia and Spain.