Introduction
Exorbitant food prices and food shortages—and, at one point, long queues for bread—became the norm in Lebanon following the country’s economic collapse in 2019, which sent shockwaves across all sectors of the economy and led to hyperinflation. By December 2022, 1.29 million Lebanese (one-third of the resident population) and 700,000 Syrian refugees (almost half the total in Lebanon) were facing severe food insecurity, with projections indicating a continued rise in 2023. Acute levels of food insecurity have been recorded among Lebanese residents of Akkar, Baabda, Baalbek, and Tripoli, as well as among Syrian refugees, who have become increasingly unable to meet their minimum survival needs.
Although Lebanon’s food-related predicament is largely perceived as a result of the country’s economic collapse, it is in fact the product of four structurally embedded and mutually reinforcing problems afflicting the country’s food system: food insecurity, a deficiency in food production, an exploitative agricultural labor sector, and a lack of environmental sustainability. Resolving all four interrelated problems requires rethinking Lebanon’s food system and creating a new food imaginary, one that is grounded in the ideals of food justice, allows for greater control by ordinary Lebanese over the food system, promotes protection of agricultural labor, and addresses distributive and sustainability issues.
Breaking Down the Multifaceted Food Crisis in Lebanon
The four problems at the origin of Lebanon’s current food predicament are largely a product of the nature of the country’s economic system, which has long been characterized by commercial and monopoly capitalism. Expanding the frame of analysis so that it includes the broader structural problems of the food system is vital for determining how to prevent the recurrence of food crises.
The Problem of Food Insecurity
Lebanon’s ongoing economic and financial collapse, which began in late 2019, has led to a depreciation of the currency, which had remained stable for some two decades at 1,500 Lebanese pounds to one U.S. dollar. By late March 2023, the rate was 107,000 pounds to the dollar. The average monthly wage of Lebanese residents, which was 2.5 million pounds in August 2022, had thus become equivalent to $15.6 (at the March 2023 exchange rate). The collapse of the currency coincided with a 500 percent increase in prices between December 2018 and October 2021.
Inflation hit food products particularly hard. According to the Lebanese Center of Statistics, food prices experienced a twentyfold increase between December 2018 and October 2021. More specifically, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization, the monthly price of both wheat (shown in figure 1) and chicken (shown in figure 2) increased by more than twenty-seven times between December 2019 and December 2022. Indeed, Lebanon ranks among the top ten countries in the world hardest hit by recent food price inflation, and in 2023 it experienced the highest food price inflation in the world, in both nominal and real terms.
The continued depreciation of the currency, together with hyperinflation and the lifting of food subsidies, has led to a drastic decline in consumer purchasing power, severely straining access to food. For instance, with 85 percent of Lebanese unable to afford basic food items, over one-third of adults are skipping meals. Some households are giving up on food quality and resorting to cheaper, less nutritious fare—putting children at risk of malnutrition—while others are compromising on healthcare and education to pay for food. Food shortages became a new reality in Lebanon—an import-dependent country—during the first two years of the crisis, during which time subsidies were lifted. Although such shortages have since eased considerably, the prices of basic goods are now very high because of the rise in import costs and the decrease in foreign currency reserves. The Beirut port explosion in August 2020 (which rendered the port’s grain silos unusable), supply-chain disruptions resulting from the coronavirus pandemic, and the war in Ukraine have exacerbated the crisis of food insecurity in Lebanon even further.
The Problem of Food Production
Another key dimension of the food system crisis that needs to be brought into the discussion is the protracted problem of food production, which stems from the nature of Lebanese capitalism. To begin with, despite its great potential for self-sustenance, the country has a weak track record in food production. This is largely due to an underdeveloped agricultural sector that is characterized by monopoly control and an orientation toward cash crops and export. The modern Lebanese state was created in 1920 following a famine that ravaged Mount Lebanon (1915–1918), which had been left vulnerable by an earlier shift from locally consumed agricultural products to exportable cash crops such as silk. Lebanon’s founders successfully sought to include agricultural regions, such as the Beqaa Valley, into the new state. Yet agriculture, much less agriculture geared toward national self-sustenance, did not subsequently emerge as central to the Lebanese economic system. Instead, almost from the state’s inception, but particularly following independence in 1943, the economy was based on laissez-faire policies that privileged the banking and commercial sectors at the expense of agriculture and industry.
This system enabled Lebanon to play an intermediary role between the international community and the Arab world during the pre-war period. Yet that role was lost because of Lebanon’s civil war (1975–1990) and the rise of the banking sector in the Gulf states. Nevertheless, the country’s economy was not significantly reoriented in the post-war period and remained dependent on construction, banking, and other service sectors.
The state’s persistent neglect of the agricultural sector led directly to import dependency, from which Lebanon continues to suffer today. For instance, about 80 percent of the food consumed by Lebanese is imported, with domestic agrifood production meeting only 20 percent of local demand. High levels of import dependency even apply to cereals and wheat, which are among the most commonly consumed food items by Lebanese. For example, 96 percent of wheat consumed in Lebanon is imported from Ukraine and Russia (80.4 percent from Ukraine and 15.5 percent from Russia). This dependency on food imports has directly contributed to the current crisis of food insecurity in Lebanon by increasing the country’s vulnerability to internal shocks such as currency devaluation and economic collapse, as well as external shocks such as the war in Ukraine. The neglect of the agricultural sector, coupled with increasing urbanization, has also led to the continued loss of agricultural land in Lebanon, which has further eroded agricultural production. Today, cultivated land represents less than one-quarter of Lebanon’s total surface area, and is thus inadequate to fulfill local food requirements. Added to this, two-thirds of agricultural land is owned by the top 10 percent of landowners, who largely control the food commodity chain, with many large land estates being directly linked to prominent political figures.
Furthermore, the system of commercial capitalism and the prevailing orientation toward the production of cash crops have meant that what food is still produced in Lebanon is often produced for profit. This has provided exporters, who are mostly from the cities—Beirut, Tripoli, Zahle, and Tyre—with power and rent. It has also led to perverse incentives and chronic dysfunctionalities in agricultural production, with a continuous shift in cash crops and fruit planting depending on market needs. For example, trees are often uprooted and replaced to accommodate changing market demands—from apricot to apple, and then from some varieties of apple to others, depending on market needs. During the current crisis, farmers have been uprooting apple trees, for which fertilizer must be bought in increasingly scarce dollars, and planting in their place apricot trees, which require less care.
The oligopoly-like grip that financiers and landlords exert on the market, and the concentration of large land ownership in the hands of a few, have created systemic inequalities across Lebanese regions while impoverishing farmers. For example, in the Beqaa Valley, the largest agricultural region in Lebanon, the urban commercial class has a monopoly over agricultural exports and thus decides on the prices of fruits and vegetables, whereas farmers are not integrated into the food value chain, further weakening them. The same is true of the food processing and distribution sector, which is in the hands of a small number of wholesalers who decide market prices. This adversely affects the availability and accessibility of food, and leads to higher prices and lower food quality. Some state policies have also given yet more power to oligopolists, for example by providing subsidies for specific agricultural products that are controlled by select families. Overall, this system, coupled with the state’s allocation of an average of only 0.87 percent of its annual budget to the Ministry of Agriculture between 1992 and 2006, resulted in a drop in agriculture’s share of the GDP from 4.9 percent in 2007 to 1.4 percent in 2021.
The Problem of Agricultural Labor
Another aspect of Lebanon’s food crisis is that of agricultural labor. Modes of land ownership and land distribution, domestic state policies, wars, and the emphasis on cash crops have led to massive displacement from rural areas to urban centers. By early 1975, on the eve of the civil war, a decades-long process of internal migration had resulted in approximately 40 percent of the rural population moving, largely to Beirut.
Though some of those displaced continued to work in agriculture on the outskirts of the cities, others became wage laborers or took jobs in the state bureaucracy. This first wave was followed by a massive and more concentrated displacement from the south, a prominent agricultural region, due to the Israeli occupation in 1982 (which would last until 2000). Such displacement contributed to chronic labor shortages in the agricultural sector, along with a continuing loss of local knowledge of environmentally appropriate domestic food production practices.
Over the years, the loss of agricultural labor was compensated for through employment of migrants and refugees, historically Palestinians and, beginning in the 1990s, Syrian migrants and, after 2011, refugees. This dependence on migrant workers exacerbated the devaluation of agricultural labor and labor exploitation, including that of children, as most farmhands are seasonal workers and employed informally. Moreover, the category of “farmer” has never had a legal status in the country. As such, agricultural laborers do not enjoy decent work conditions and social protection, and are subject to discriminatory practices in terms of their compensation and treatment.
For example, before the current economic crisis, male Syrian agricultural workers in the Beqaa and Akkar earned a daily wage of no more than 8,000–10,000 Lebanese pounds, while their female counterparts earned around 6,000 pounds per day. By contrast, Lebanese agricultural workers earned between 20,000 and 40,000 pounds daily. Additionally, agricultural laborers frequently were the lowest-paid and most financially vulnerable workers across all employment sectors. The heavy dependence on exploited agricultural labor and the devaluation of farm workers’ status have led to a lack of investment in technological innovation when it comes to food production at all cycles, contributing to low productivity and a crisis of sustainability.
The Problem of Environmental Sustainability
The capital-intensive nature of production in Lebanon has led to a crisis of environmental sustainability, especially relating to the country’s unsustainable food production practices. Heavy use of agrochemicals such as synthetic fertilizers and pesticides to maximize crop yields and profits has caused great harm to the environment, as chemicals leak into and contaminate the soil, making it unsustainable to grow crops and decreasing agricultural productivity.
Environmental issues also arise because of the increasing dependence on monoculture farming, a large-scale commercial approach that involves planting only one crop over a large area. This depletes the soil of essential nutrients and contributes to a loss of biodiversity, thus raising the likelihood of crop failure, reducing agricultural productivity, and increasing the risk of food shortages. Large-scale farming has also caused deforestation, which has led to further loss of biodiversity, as well as reduced soil fertility and water availability.
Yet the crisis of environmental sustainability in Lebanon is perhaps most clearly manifested in the growing deficit of freshwater in the country. The high use of agrochemicals, the over-pumping of underground water, and the discharge into rivers of untreated sewage, industrial effluents, and agricultural runoff have led to the contamination of water in Lebanon. One estimate holds that more than half of the country’s water resources is polluted, while another maintains that 90 percent of urban water is contaminated. Water pollution not only affects the quality of drinking water; it also affects agricultural production and food safety because untreated contaminated water is used for irrigation, thereby causing bacterial contamination of irrigated plants and fresh crops.
The problem of water pollution is exacerbated by increasing water shortages in Lebanon, the result of inefficient irrigation systems and poor water governance structures. The past four decades have witnessed a decrease in surface water resources of more than 55 percent, and a 40 percent decline in discharge from the Litani, Damour, and Kabir Rivers. During the same period, 60 percent of Lebanon’s springs dried up.
Three Pillars for Food Justice in Lebanon
In the wake of the current crisis, many alternatives have been suggested to achieve food security in Lebanon. However, most of the proposed solutions are technical, programmatic, and reflective of the hegemony of the commercial capitalist system. As such, they are devoid of critical social analysis, lack a theory of the state, and provide no analysis of global production and exchange.
For instance, several policy recommendations by civil society and the public and private sectors focus on promoting cash crops (for example, potatoes to sell to Iraq). Other civil society–based solutions are focused on permaculture, agricultural cooperatives, or providing subsidies in the form of agricultural chemicals and herds of livestock to sustain rural communities. These solutions, while useful as quick fixes, fall short of addressing the structural problems that have engendered inequalities at all levels, depleted water supplies, and abused the environment. And while several commendable food initiatives, such as Souk el Tayeb and Fair Trade, have recently emerged in Lebanon, they haven’t yet formed a new food imaginary that addresses the country’s key structural problems.
Since times of crisis provide good opportunities to create new political imaginaries, the situation in Lebanon today is an opportune moment to rethink the country’s food system. Unless Lebanese officials address the problems of food production, labor, and the environment, as well as scalar inequalities, the food crisis will not come to an end. Specifically, a new food system must overcome the structural problems that hamstring Lebanon.
The most advisable food imaginary would have three pillars and be grounded in the principle of food justice. The latter is broadly defined as the right of local people, including the urban population, to control their own food systems—including markets, ecological resources, food cultures, and production modes—and to challenge corporate food regimes. The principle of food justice also seeks to establish a food system that is fair, equitable, inclusive, and sustainable. To do this, it must address the underlying structural obstacles to accessing healthy and sustainable food.
The first pillar involves attaining food security by promoting food production for local consumption, and thereby decreasing dependency on market and currency fluctuations. This would entail revaluing small-scale agricultural production and decreasing the dependency on capital-intensive forms of production, while providing greater attention to social and environmental contexts. It would also involve investing in the creation of supply networks that contribute to systemic wellbeing, rather than those that merely extract value.
Related to this is reform of the food production system, the second pillar of a new food imaginary, which can be achieved only through structural changes to the political economy of Lebanon. These changes consist of recentering the agrarian question and revaluing the agricultural sector, creating more balance between the different economic sectors, addressing the problem of highly unequal agricultural land-ownership patterns, and putting an end to the monopoly over the distribution and preservation of food. It is also important to end the class-based exploitative features of the system by promoting several principles: formalizing farmworkers’ legal status; extending protection schemes to poor farmers and providing them with social security; providing fair wages and ensuring decent working conditions for food system workers; allowing labor unionization; treating migrant labor as local labor; and keeping abreast of technological innovation, which can address aspects of labor exploitation.
Finally, in order to protect the rights of future generations, it is imperative to ensure environmental and agricultural sustainability. This would entail reducing food waste, supporting local agriculture, and promoting sustainable food production practices such as organic farming and the use of organic fertilizers and indigenous seeds to avoid polluting water and the environment. Local communities should adopt agroecological practices. Agroecology pursues sustainability by emphasizing ecological principles and the processes of agricultural production, and is centered on sustainable farming systems that are in harmony with the environment, preserve biodiversity, and promote social justice, all while putting the farmer’s agency and political sovereignty at the center.
Conclusion
The creation of the modern state of Lebanon was in part a result of the famine that struck Mount Lebanon, where there had been a shift in agriculture to cash crops at the expense of locally consumed agricultural products. Yet in the newly created Lebanese state, laissez-faire policies were chosen at the expense of building a more sustainable and equitable economy. The current food crisis provides a window to create a different political imaginary for Lebanon. This new imaginary should be grounded in a system that is fair to the farmers, to labor, to the environment, and to Lebanese citizens more generally, in order to prevent monopoly and exploitation at all levels. This would also mean giving back power to food growers (whether in rural or urban areas), recognizing their agency, prioritizing local knowledge and practices over the commodification of food and labor, and addressing the problem of highly unequal patterns of land ownership in Lebanon. All this can be achieved only if and when the Lebanese state acts as a redistributive power, rather than as an entity that works to maintain prevailing class structures.
