Driving Forces and Hampering Factors Affecting Establishment and Development of Date Processing Industries in Khuzestan Province

Development of date palm fruit processing and by-products industries has a great importance in employment and poverty alleviation, reducing wastes, increasing food security, increasing productivity, added-value, and export, development and exchange of technologies and sustainable development of rural areas. This study has been conducted for investigation of state and capabilities of Khuzestan date industry via SWOT matrix based. The results led to the identification of 13 opportunities and 10 threats from external factors and 4 key strengths and 10 key weaknesses from internal factors matrix. The state coordinate of Khuzestan date industry found to be 2.58 and 1.83 for external and internal factors respectively, which in turn placed the industry in the conservative strategy space. Two factors of "access to domestic and foreign new technologies", and "availability of low cost labor" with balanced score of 0.284 were recognized as the key driving forces, while "Lack of information and advertising in the local and international scenes to introduce Iranian dates as a luxury and high nutritional value fruit" and “Lack of Brand and leader companies" with balanced score of 0.172 were the key hampering factors. Five top priority strategies were identified using Quantitative Strategic Planning Matrix in order of importance as follows: "increasing the market share of date products in domestic and foreign markets by extending marketing and advertising", "Improvement and modernization of food processing plants in accordance with related standards", "Improving quality of products by using novel internal and external technologies", "establishment of a consortium between firms in order to participate in special features" and "increasing production volume". Balanced score for these strategies were 4.93, 4.63, 4.54, 4.2 and 4.19 respectively.