Economic independence grows at Palestinian mushroom farm

posted on: Mar 16, 2015

In a corrugated iron building a few miles from Jericho’s town center, rows of dirt trays are stacked floor to ceiling. Inside the trays, soft white mushrooms grow under florescent lights.

Women in matching aprons and colorful headscarves pick the day’s harvest and package the small bulbs neatly into small plastic containers, ready to be delivered to shops across the occupied West Bank.

“There was no Palestinian mushroom in the Palestinian market, so all our consumption of fresh mushrooms would come from the Israeli market — and our philosophy is against that,” Mahmoud Kuhail, the thirty-year-old co-founder of Amoro Agriculture and owner of the mushroom farm, told The Electronic Intifada.

Together, the West Bank and Gaza Strip are Israel’s second largest importer. The West Bank alone provides more than $3.3 billion to the Israeli economy every year, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics.

Source: electronicintifada.net