Modernising Jordan's largest wholesale food market — a World Bank-funded feasibility study for Greater Amman Municipality.

Greater Amman Municipality's central wholesale market for fruits and vegetables — located in Al-Jwaideh, roughly 20 kilometres east of the capital — is the spine of Jordan's food distribution system. Across a 17-hectare site, the market handles more than 3,000 tonnes of fresh produce daily, channels approximately 70% of Jordan's wholesale fruit and vegetable trade, and is the price-setting node for fresh produce nationally.

It also operates inside infrastructure, food-safety enforcement, logistics, and market-governance norms that no longer match the standards of a modern capital. Outdated cold-chain and storage infrastructure drive avoidable food loss. The absence of grading, sorting, and primary-processing capacity inside the market depresses farmer income — the average net income at the market is around 12 Jordanian dinars per tonne. Opaque price discovery and weak food-safety enforcement compound the inefficiency. The market continues to play an indispensable role in Jordan's agricultural value chain, but the system around it constrains the value the market could be generating.

In this context, Greater Amman Municipality, supported by MoPIC and funded by the World Bank's Multi-Donor Trust Fund, commissioned a comprehensive feasibility study covering concept development and schematic design for the modernised market. The mandate's brief was to assess the technical, economic, financial, and institutional viability of a path forward — and to produce documentation that would survive donor audit and underpin downstream financing decisions.