Afghanistan Chamber of Commerce and Investments (ACCI) said Monday that this year pomegranate exports to foreign markets, especially Pakistan’s markets may fall by up to 50 percent.

The chamber said that so far about 25,000 tons of pomegranate have been exported through varieties of ways while it 70,000 tons of pomegranate were exported in the same period last year.

According to the chamber export problems including high custom tariff on Afghan pomegranate exports with Pakistan yet not solved and this is one the main reason why less amount of pomegranate exported to foreign markets especially to Pakistan.

“We don't have much exports so far, the information we get from our gardens from Kandahar most of the pomegranates has not been collected from most of our gardens,” said ACCI deputy chief Mohammad Younus Mohmand.

A number of Kandahar gardeners are once again worried about their problems and said that their pomegranates will not have much market this year.

“We don’t know when the government will help us in finding market for our products, at the moment most of our gardens are full of pomegranates,” said Mazullah, a gardener in Kandahar province.

Meanwhile, statistic from the last month provided by the Ministry of Industry and Commerce shows that the ministry had 4,000 tons of pomegranates in the last month while in the same period of last year it was 9,000 tons of pomegranates.

“We are trying to export more pomegranates this year. We are trying to find new markets and export pomegranates and other fruits,” said Samir Rasa, the ministry spokesman.

At the beginning of this year, the Ministry of Industry and Commerce announced that we had an increase of 20% in the country exports.

A number of economists, accusing the government over lack of proper plan for the county export.