Rising salinity and heat push Basra to grow date palms in the lab

Scientists are scaling up tissue-culture to grow disease-free date palms

A drone view of workers tending to tissue-cultured date palm saplings inside a greenhouse in Basra, Iraq, Jan 20, 2026, where young plants are acclimatised before being transferred to farms. REUTERS/Mohammed Aty

In greenhouses and sterile laboratories west of Basra, Iraqi technicians wearing gloves and masks lift tiny date palm shoots from jars, hoping one day to restore orchards laid waste by decades of war, land loss and creeping water salinity.

Date palms, once central to Iraq's agricultural economy, have been ravaged by the upstream damming of the Tigris and Euphrates, declining rainfall, seawater intrusion and decades of conflict.

In a private-sector push, scientists and officials are now scaling up tissue-culture propagation to produce disease-free date palm saplings and preserve rare Iraqi varieties.

"Tissue-culture agriculture is distinguished mainly by its high production," said Mohammed Abdulrazzaq, director of Nakheel Al Basra. "In previous methods, a palm tree could give you three to four offshoots, but with tissue culture, we can produce thousands of offshoots from a single palm."

FROM ONE PALM, THOUSANDS MORE

Nakheel Al Basra, one of the province's largest tissue-culture laboratories, began operations in 2023 and can produce up to 250,000 palm seedlings a year, said Abdulrazzaq, adding that tissue-culture palms have a success rate of up to 99 percent.

Inside the laboratory, workers use masks and gloves when handling palm samples to limit contamination. Tiny shoots are kept in jars on racks and moved through stages designed to produce uniform, disease-free planting material.

Abdulrazzaq said wars, the bulldozing of farmland and rising water salinity had pushed some Iraqi date varieties to "the verge of extinction."

Iraq's water security has become a pressing issue as levels in the Euphrates and Tigris have fallen sharply, compounded by upstream dams, mainly in Turkey.

In Shatt al-Arab, the drop has allowed seawater from the Gulf to push further inland, driving salinity to unprecedented levels, which farmers describe as an advancing "saline tongue" in their water supplies.

Basra alone once had 13 million palm trees out of 32 million across Iraq, said Dr Jassim Mohammed, head of the agriculture department at Basra's Directorate of Agriculture, but the number has since fallen sharply.

TOUGHENED TO WITHSTAND HEAT AND SALT

Researchers at the facility say producing seedlings is only part of the challenge in Basra, where summer temperatures can exceed 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit) and salt levels in water can surge.

To improve survival rates, young palms are acclimatised to extreme conditions before planting by gradually raising temperatures, said Ismail Sadiq, a researcher at Nakheel Al Basra.

The process starts at 25C (77F) and is stepped up to about 52C (126F), a level he said can be reached in Basra in summer.

"So, when moved to any place with similar or higher temperatures, the palm is fully acclimatised," Sadiq said.

He said salt concentrations are also increased gradually inside the laboratory, from no added salt to 6,000 to 8,000 parts per million (ppm), to prepare the plants for saline water in the field.

Standing in a greenhouse lined with rows of young palms and irrigation lines, Abdulrazzaq said the process had entered its post-lab stage.

"The palms are now ready to be sold to farmers and need six months before being planted in the ground," he said. "They are prepared for outdoor conditions."

Some farmers say the technique is already improving survival rates. Farmer Faysal al-Khazraji said he planted 100 tissue culture seedlings alongside 100 conventional offshoots.

"All 100 tissue culture palms succeeded, while the other 100… honestly we only got 25," he said.

Abdulrazzaq said the laboratory is propagating Iraqi varieties including Barhi, while also introducing imported commercial types such as Sukkary. Seedlings around 30 cm tall sell locally for $40 to $60, he added.

Tissue-culture palms now represent more than 15 percent of varieties in Basra's Al-Zubair and Safwan areas, said Saleh Hassan, director of agriculture in Basra's al-Zubair district.

Basra has added about 600,000 palms over the past five years, bringing the total to around three million, according to Dr Mohammed, who said tissue-cultured palms account for more than 100,000 of those.