Page:Syria and Palestine WDL11774.pdf/108

 between Jaffa and Haifa, whence they are sent in large numbers to Constantinople and Egypt in the autumn. There is also some export of onions from Tripoli and Latakia. Experiments recently made with sugar-beet by Jewish colonists are said to have given satisfactory results.

Other crops. Tobacco. The Beirut vilayet and the Lebanon are the chief tobacco-growing districts, smaller amounts being produced also in the vilayets of Aleppo (at Aintab and Killis) and Damascus. According to official statistics the area under tobacco in the departmental districts of Latakia, Aleppo, and Beirut with Damascus, in the year 1911-12 was 20,203 donum (about 18-5 sq. km., 4,652 acres), and the produce 1,310,000 kg.; in the following year the production was larger, the export from Latakia alone amounting to 1,323,944 kg. The Latakia smoke-dried tobacco is practically all exported, about 90 per cent. going to England. There is also an export to Egypt both of the ordinary tobacco and of tombac, a variety used in the nargileh or hookah, and grown mainly about Latakia. The total value of the tobacco crop, which is subject to official restriction, is put at about five million francs.

Cotton was extensively cultivated during the American Civil War, but subsequently died out along the coast, and in central and southern Syria it has reappeared only in the last ten years. The neighbourhoods of Latakia, Akka, Tiberias, and Nablus, and the valleys of Esdraelon and the Buka'a now produce some 1,000 tons, and approximately twice that amount is grown in the Aleppo vilayet (chiefly about Edlib, Dana, Killis, and Aintab), where heavy dews make artificial irrigation unnecessary.

Hemp, the annual crop of which was estimated in 1911 at about 1,300 tons, is grown chiefly in the Barada valley (Damascus), and to a less extent in the Euphrates district of the Aleppo vilayet. The best fibres are exported, and the rest used in the factories of Damascus.