Jordan and Israel signed an agricultural cooperation agreement ahead of the shmita year, in a meeting between Israeli Agriculture Minister Oded Forrer and his Jordanian counterpart Rasan al-Majali on the border between the countries on Tuesday.
“Shmita” is the biblical commandment for the Land of Israel to lay fallow every seven years, and Jewish farmers in most of modern Israel must observe it for their produce to be certified kosher. One solution Israel has found is to purchase produce from neighboring Arab populations; others, which are preferred by many religious Zionists, include symbolically selling their land to a gentile or moving their farms from private to collectively-owned for the shmita year.
Forrer and Majali met on the Allenby Bridge, along with the ambassadors of the two countries.
Agriculture Ministry said it would diversify the sources of fruits and vegetables for those who keep kosher, and take advantage of benefits in the trade agreement between the countries.
The ministers also discussed ways to partner on innovation and technological advances in agriculture, as well as fighting diseases in plants.
They also discussed fighting fires in both countries, and the role farmers can play.
The meeting “emphasizes the importance of the ties between Israel and Jordan to strengthen neighborly relations and promote cooperation, and the importance of the agricultural field as a way to advance relations between the countries and the nations,” a spokesman for Forrer stated.
In the two months since the new government took office in Jerusalem, Prime Minister Naftali Bennett and Defense Minister Benny Gantz met with Jordanian King Abdullah, and Foreign Minister Yair Lapid met with his Jordanian counterpart Ayman Sfadi. Israel agreed to sell more water to Jordan than stipulated in the peace agreement between the countries and to allow Jordan to increase its exports to the Palestinian Authority.
