LAHORE: The city’s largest date festival and expo is under way at the Organic Village in Lahore, with large numbers of residents attending on the event’s second day.
More than 100 varieties of dates have been put on display at the festival. The different types and flavours have become a particular focus of visitor attention.
Various products prepared from dates are also part of the exhibition, while horse dance, a royal carriage and a puppet show have been arranged for the entertainment of families.
Secretary Religious Affairs Ehsan Bhatta also attended the date festival and visited various stalls, where he received a briefing from the organisers.
Speaking on the occasion, Ehsan Bhatta said that public-private partnership is indispensable for economic development.
Residents praised the holding of the date festival and expressed interest in the different varieties of dates and in the recreational activities.
The scale of the display — more than 100 varieties in a single venue — reflects a crop base that is broader than most urban consumers realise. Pakistan is among the world’s leading date-producing countries, with commercial cultivation concentrated in Sindh, Balochistan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa and southern Punjab. Khairpur in Sindh, Panjgur and Turbat in Balochistan, and Dera Ismail Khan are the recognised production clusters, each associated with distinct varieties.
The sector’s persistent difficulty has not been production volume but value capture. A large share of the crop has traditionally moved into the low-value dried-date segment because of post-harvest losses, limited cold-chain infrastructure, sun-drying on open floors and weak grading and packaging standards. The result is that a country producing at scale has historically underperformed in premium export markets relative to competitors with comparable or smaller harvests.
That is the context in which the presence of value-added date products at the expo is commercially meaningful. Processing — into pastes, syrups, confectionery, bakery inputs and packaged retail lines — is where margin is created, and where domestic branding can convert an agricultural surplus into an export proposition.
Direct-to-consumer events of this kind serve a function beyond the weekend outing. They give growers and small processors a route to urban buyers that bypasses layered commission agents, allow price discovery on premium grades, and provide the kind of consumer feedback that is otherwise unavailable to a farmer selling into a wholesale mandi.
The family programming — the horse dance, the royal carriage and the puppet show — is what converts a trade display into a footfall event, and footfall is what makes participation worthwhile for the small stallholders the format is meant to serve.
The festival continues at the Organic Village.
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