JAZAN: Efforts are underway to increase the number of coffee trees in the southern governorate of Al-Dayer to a million by 2030, from the current amount of 158,000. The push comes as the annual Coffee Beans Festival takes place in Jazan for the seventh time. The event, which ends on Feb. 4, brings together nearly 200 farmers. It has expanded this year to include a coffee street, a cinema showing films on coffee production and tourism activities that underline the historical importance of coffee bean cultivation in the region. The governor of Al-Dayer, Nayef bin Lebdah, said that the finest types of coffee came from the south of the Kingdom, and that production had increased by 50 percent to reach 336 tons, an increase of 109 tons from the previous year. The rise has been helped by an integrated government program covering the development, production, manufacture and marketing of Arabic coffee in order to boost the production efficiency of the coffee crop to 7,000 tons annually by the end of 2025. Bin Lebdah said that Al-Dayer’s coffee farms were being supported by a sustainable rural development program from the Ministry of Environment, Water and Agriculture and the Mountain Areas Development Authority. Saudi Aramco is also supporting Al-Dayer’s coffee industry through a project to raise knowledge and improve production standards among hundreds of farmers in Jazan, by providing tools and training in the latest coffee cultivation methods and planting new trees. Bin Lebdah said the company had carried out four phases of the project and that by mid-2020 it will have planted more than 67,000 trees. The next step was to double the current quantities of coffee production. “We are in the process of benefiting from 82,000 coffee trees that have not started production yet,” the governor told Arab News.