With every passing day, indicators of Lebanon’s ongoing economic crisis become starker and darker. Both the implications of the coronavirus pandemic, including the two-month lockdown which deprived hundreds of their livelihoods despite its necessity, and the devastating impact of August 4’s port explosion have exacerbated an already grim situation. They have also highlighted the dismal state of Lebanon’s food sufficiency, defined by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) as “a country producing a proportion of its own food needs that approaches or exceeds 100 percent of its food consumption”.
The agriculture and agro-industry sectors in Lebanon are underdeveloped, contributing only 5 percent each to GDP according to FAO[1]. As such, Lebanon is dependent on imports to meet the food needs of its citizens and 85 percent of the country’s basic food needs is imported, according to FAO. Even in locally produced foods, there is usually an element that is imported, be it the feed for farm animals, the seeds, and pesticides used to grow vegetables and fruits, or even containers.
Imported items are largely paid for in dollars, and so with the steady increase in the foreign exchange rate, the importation cost - and hence the price - of these items is rapidly becoming prohibitive for most Lebanese. The price of the average food basked in Lebanon increased by 120 percent in August 2020 as compared to the same period last year, according to the Consumer Price Index in Lebanon. The World Food Programme (WFP) recorded that there was a 56 percent rise in prices of food between October 2019 and April 2020, and all indicators support the idea that prices are continuing to increase. WFP also notes that 49 percent of Lebanese are worried about their access to food[2].
Despite the bleakness of the situation, some have not given up on trying to find solutions, no matter how small, for Lebanon’s food situation. “Great ideas come from crisis, at the end of the day, because you are trying to solve a real-life problem,” says Ziad Hourani, co-founder of “From The Villages”, an e-commerce platform that connects 28 producers so far in several villages in south Lebanon with consumers in Beirut[3]. Following August’s Beirut Blast, From the Village shifted its operations towards helping those affected by the explosion and is now slowly going back to its original business model, says co-founder Hani Touma who is now leading operations of the platform.
Indeed, several initiatives have cropped up to reimagine Lebanon’s relation with the food it consumes by going back to the basics, and encouraging more local production or supporting local farmers and agro-industrialists.
Some of these initiatives are aimed at encouraging individuals or communities to grow a portion of their food needs. These types of initiatives found fertile grounds during the COVID-19 related lockdown measures. “The combination of being bored at home and concerned about accessing food led to an increased interest in home planting”, says Salim Zwein co-founder of the 44 thousand plus members Facebook group IZRAA, a community platform where members share their planting challenges and propose solutions among each other. Zwein says that interest in individual planting has continued to grow post lockdown and membership is increasing by 1,000 every few days.
“As people found success in their small scale planting efforts, such as growing herbs on their balconies, they’ve evolved to bigger projects with many now planting small plots of land in their villages”, says Zwein based on his observations of the group. He also adds that questions raised by the group members have moved beyond planting, as people ask about taking care of farm animals and even silkworms (hoping to use the threads to make their own clothes).
The port explosion drove more people out of Beirut and into the mountains where they again took up planting what they could.
Municipalities, such as the Municipality of Shweir -Ain El Sindyaneh, also encouraged growing fruits and vegetables within their areas either through distributing seeds to residents or by offering up plots of land to be either planted by the residents themselves or by professional growers. Early this fall season, crops planted by the municipality were distributed to the community’s needy families.
In parallel to these efforts that encourage planting, there are also several initiatives that have been launched since the last days of 2019 to date, which support local food producers. Although the concept of supporting local producers is not new in Lebanon - Souk el Tayeb, one example of a successful farmers’ market, has recently located to a bigger location in Mar Mikhael– consumers have been more open to embracing them because local food items are generally more affordable and available than imported ones.
Also, following the Beirut blast and the worsening of the country’s economic conditions, international interest in the funding of local agricultural products has grown, says Zwein.
Despite the merit of these initiatives, their impact is likely to remain at the community and individual levels in the absence of a government-initiated national plan for agriculture and of reforms. Such a plan would include establishing and empowering farmers’ cooperatives in Lebanon to reduce cost on farmers (sharing machinery, for example), and to give them bargaining power with traders, according to Zwein. It can also include tax exemption on imported goods for agro-industry or support in exports. The suggestions are many, and the path is long before Lebanon can truly claim farm-to-fork in at least a percentage of its food production. But at least there are sincere and impactful efforts in the right direction.