THREAD As Lebanon‘s currency crisis makes imports prohibitively expensive, both diets and farming practices will change—or a falafel sandwich could become a luxury in the coming months.
Rice, for example, is consumed regularly, taken for granted, but almost impossible to grow locally. A bag of rice branded “made in Lebanon” is always imported, locally packaged in imported plastic.
Chickpeas and lentils are also part of daily cuisine and native to the region. But in 2017, Lebanon imported fourteen times more lentils than it grows, and chickpeas almost five times.
Even crops grown locally rely on imported input, from seeds, fertilizers, and insecticides to machinery and fuel, not to forget the abundant use of migrant labor.
Some individual initiatives already favor local producers. Farmers connect directly with consumers, through baskets that replace imported goods found in supermarkets. But it will take a national strategy to achieve tangible results.
Such a strategy would promote better use of arable land, local production of inputs such as compost and fertilizers, development of cooperatives to pool costs, and support for farmers markets that further link producers with consumers.
Groups such as the #agrinerds are sharing extremely valuable information, technical and structural, with ordinary Lebanese, but they have yet to be heard by the government.
Lebanon won’t have to start from scratch: It already has much experience and research to build on. Making it more widely accessible, not just to officials but to farmers themselves, might be the first step in seeding change
