For Iraqi Farmers, A Harvest of Hope

"Some of them were threatened by terrorists and had to leave," he said.

Khalid al-Sanjary, the mayor of Baqubah, said 40 families had recently been driven out of their villages by the violence.

In his address to the guests, Tamimi made an impassioned plea for calm. "This is a cancer for the farmers," he said. "We don't want the farmers to leave. We want peace in our country."

Seated in the audience was Abu Alla, a member of the local agricultural chamber. For him, the violence was not the only concern. He said the harvest is much less than prewar yields. "It should be twice as much," he said.

"There's no actual support once we treated the dates with planes," added Abu Alla, who asked that his full name not be used. "But our palms are sick and they need further treatment. All agriculture in Iraq needs equipment and treatment. We have the experience but we have lack of equipment."

More than two decades ago, Iraq, known as the "land of the palms," had 30 million trees, more than anywhere else in the world. But the Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s and Hussein's campaign to destroy Shiite marshes and farmland cut the number of palm trees in half. U.N. sanctions imposed in the 1990s further slashed exports. Iraq once supplied the world market with 600,000 tons of dates a year. Today, it produces an estimated 250,000 tons.

For Abu Alla, reviving the date palm industry has religious significance. The palm tree is mentioned 21 times in Islam's holy book, the Koran. Muslims eat dates to break fasts during the holy month of Ramadan. "Our dates are very sacred. They are blessed. They are a symbol. They are a part of Islam," he said.

U.S. Army Maj. Marcus Snow, a member of the State Department Provincial Reconstruction Team in Diyala, is a stockbroker from Lancaster, Pa., who has worked with the date farmers since May. "This place could have fed the Middle East," he said with enthusiasm. "The soil is fantastic. They have so much potential, it kills me. This is, literally, the Garden of Eden."

Tapping that potential, he said, will require more action than simply growing dates. The farmers need to adopt better accounting, production and marketing practices and to use better packaging and transportation systems, he said. For starters, they need to process their dates in Baqubah, he said. Unprocessed dates are sold to Dubai for $300 a ton, he said. Processed dates could yield $3,000 a ton.

Before the invasion, there were several processing plants in Baqubah. But the owners fled the violence. Snow said he has approached some of them to come back and reopen their plants. No luck.

"They know they can make more money investing elsewhere than here," Snow said. "They are bait for kidnappers. They want to play it safe."

Mohammad, whose family has grown dates here since the 18th century, has no plans to flee, despite the attempt on his life. He predicts his harvest this year will be 70 percent more than last year, although that's still a third less than what he produced in 2000.

He can only imagine how it would be if there were peace.

"If the situation was better, I would have a very beautiful garden," Mohammad said, with a smile.