Conventional media portrayals of Syrian refugees in Lebanon evoke a familiar image: women and children standing wide-eyed in front of their modest white tarpaulin tents, with the ubiquitous blue UNHCR logo serving as a reminder of their seemingly temporary status. Against the backdrop of Lebanon’s deepening economic crisis over the past two years, Syrians have become convenient scapegoats for the country’s problems, as the stereotyped figure of the aid-dependent refugee has served as a justification for stricter controls on Syrians’ cross-border and internal mobility. And yet, the vast majority of Syrian refugees are not idly waiting in camps for UN aid, nor are they a drain on Lebanon’s economy. On the contrary, from construction, to agriculture, to delivery services, Syrians form the very backbone of Lebanon’s low-wage labor force, alongside other migrant populations.

As an anthropologist, I spent eighteen months laboring everyday alongside Syrian farmworker-refugees in Lebanon’s agricultural heartland, the Bekaa Valley. Much of my fieldwork took place in a camp run by a shaweesh, who I will pseudonymously call Abu Sharif. Abu Sharif is one among hundreds ofshaweesh in Lebanon who provide shelter and work opportunities to Syrians through an elaborate labor-recruiting system. Though shaweesh camps (known as warshat) have existed since the 1980s, the network of camps they operate expanded significantly after Syrians began to flee to Lebanon en masse with the start of the 2011 Syrian war. Hailing from the poorest regions of Syria, these precarious refugee-workers supply a highly flexible supply of cheap labor to virtually every farm in the Bekaa Valley.

It is increasingly evident that Lebanon faces an imminent food crisis, an outcome of a series of converging economic, environmental, and epidemiological shocks that have sent food prices soaring. This is a reflection of a broader crisis of food production worldwide. Amidst decades of liberalizing labor regulations and privatizing public agricultural institutions and resources, one of the defining features of today’s “neoliberal food regime” is the massive migration of landless and land-poor farmers in search of waged work across borders. Within Lebanon’s agricultural sector, this role has been crucially filled by Syrian migrant laborers who, for the past several decades, have migrated seasonally across the border to plant, harvest, and weed the essential crops upon which Lebanese consumers depend.

Prior to the 2011 war, Syrian nationals were permitted to spend six months as temporary residents in Lebanon, returning frequently to Syria for health care, schooling, and subsidized goods. Since the conflict in Syria began in 2011, many of these formerly seasonal workers have effectively become stuck in Lebanon, thus bearing the higher costs of living in Lebanon year-round. Facing the loss of social benefits from the Syrian welfare state and a source of subsistence from their land in Syria, many displaced Syrians working in agriculture have become increasingly dependent on labor opportunities offered by shaweesh camps. 

Abu Sharif’s camp functions through a credit-debt system, in which Syrian workers go into debt for the cost of their tent and their yearly rent, as well as everyday consumption needs, health care, and major occasions such as weddings and funerals. Abu Sharif’s accounting system is measured in terms of year-long seasonal commitments for each tent in the camp. Those who remain indebted (عليهن), which is usually the majority, are obliged to stay in the camp and keep working for the upcoming year. Those who have worked off their debt (الهن) have the option to leave the camp and work in a different camp or go back to Syria.

While it would be tempting to cast Abu Sharif as an exploitative figure preying upon hapless refugees, it is important to emphasise that his role within Lebanese agriculture is determined by much broader economic and political forces. It is the drive for a flexible supply of cheap labor among Lebanese employers and landlords that keeps the shaweesh labor recruitment system alive. The local and regional export agricultural market in Lebanon is highly unregulated. A casual visit to the vegetable markets in Qab Elias and Ferzol reveals that prices fluctuate significantly on a day-to-day basis, and sometimes even from hour to hour. For this reason, Lebanese employers are attracted to the flexibility of shaweesh camps, as they can cancel, shorten, or reduce labor assignments depending on the market. Lebanese employers pay Abu Sharif  8,000 LL for each worker per five-hour shift, from which he takes a 2,000 LL commission. In the winter season, workers are lucky to receive one shift, taking home 6000 LL per person each day. During the summer, each worker can expect to make about 12,000 per day.

The workers who live in theshaweeshcamps, whether male or female, are always referred to collectively by Lebanese employers as “girls” (banat), which indexes their feminized position within the agricultural labor market. For example, a typical way in which a Lebanese employer requests workers for the next day is to say to Abu Sharif, “Bring us XX number of girls tomorrow (جيبلنا كذا بنات بكرا).” The designation of certain tasks as “women’s work” and others as “men’s work” is a mechanism of normalizing the cheapening of the wage, as women’s work is consistently undervalued. Camp residents are conditioned to be highly compliant and adaptable to the varying duration, intensity, and nature of their work assignments. I can recall on countless occasions waking up in workers’ tents for the morning shift to the sound of rain, which was always a tell-tale sign that there would be no work and no wages that day, even if it had been promised to them by Abu Sharif the day before. Lebanese employers are afforded flexibility in payments, which are paid to Abu Sharif retroactively rather than as an advance because the number of workers varies so significantly from day-to-day. This means that, for the duration of a given season, Abu Sharif must carefully manage flows of payment from employers in relation to flows of payment to workers, even if he has not yet been paid by employers. Because work assignments are structured around an on-call labor reserve system, Abu R’s bank account is vulnerable to fluctuations and liquidity problems, especially in the winter low season.

Alongside the drive for cheap, flexible labor among Lebanese employers, the dynamics of speculation in agricultural land among Lebanese absentee landlords is an additional force sustaining theshaweeshlabor recruitment system. Abu Sharif’s camp is situated on a small tract of previously uncultivated agricultural land owned by a Lebanese absentee landlord residing in Qatar. The yearly rent for the camp is $16,667, which Abu Sharif divides among each household and pays to the Lebanese landlord via bank transfer every year. There are thirty tents in the camp, not all of which are filled. The camp residents pay anywhere from 750,000 to 1,000,000 LL per year in rent to Abu Sharif, depending on the size of their tent.

I recently spoke to Abu Sharif about how the currency crisis in Lebanon has affected the workers living in his camp. “The increase in prices is obscene (غلاء فاحش),” he sighed. “The price of the worker remains the same. And a bag of sugar is 56,000. The worker is working on the dollar. God help the worker (الأسعار الفاعل هو ذاته. وكيس السكر ب ٥٦٠٠٠. الفاعل عم بيشتغل ع دولار. الله يكون بعون الفاعل). Worse yet, he lamented, the landlord in Qatar who owns the land on which the camp is situated insists that the yearly rent be paid in dollars. This poses a significant problem for Abu Sharif’s accounting, as the workers’ wages are still paid in Lebanese lira. “I told her, ‘I have 15 million lira for you (الك معي ١٥ مليون لبناني),” Abu Sharif said, emphasizing that his careful calculations of the camp’s debt and credit balances could not have accounted for such a precipitous devaluation of the Lebanese currency. “I told her, ‘Have mercy, Madame, the situation is tragic. The situation is tragic, Madame. People can barely eat or drink. We used to get a bag of sugar for 17,000 or 18,000. Now it’s 56,000’” (قلتلها الله وكيلك مدام الوضع مأساوي مدام الوضع مأساوي. العالم ما عم تلحق تاكل وتشرب. كنت اولي نجيب كيس سكر ١٧٠٠٠ أو ١٨٠٠٠. اليوم٥٦٠٠٠). He continued, “I swear to God, everyone (in the camp) is working on a day’s sustenance alone. What is the value of a worker’s daily wage of 6000 or 7000? Before, it was worth $4. That was okay. Today, it’s worth a dollar!” (والله العظيم العالم عم يشتغل على القوت اليومي. شو يعني اجار البنت ٦٠٠٠ او ٧٠٠٠؟  كانت اولي تشتغل ٤ دولار ماشي الحال. اليوم دولار).”

Though Abu Sharif did not state it explicitly, it appears that his camp faces a real possibility of imminent eviction, as the inflated value of yearly rent payments and the simultaneous devaluation workers’ wages has sent the camp deep into debt. The hundreds of othershaweeshcamps across Lebanon’s agricultural fields are surely facing a similar predicament. Within the specific dynamics of Abu Sharif’s camp, the broader contradictions of the Lebanese currency crisis are evident. Contrary to the common-sense notion that such labor arrangements are due to “corruption” or “bad-intentioned opportunists,” the shaweesh labor recruitment system emerged and expanded because it was profitable to a class of prosperous Lebanese landlords and employers. This system now faces the threat of collapse due to the contradictions inherent in the very forces that once made it profitable: Lebanon’s rentier-capitalist approach to food production.

Lebanon’s food crisis has brought into focus a tragic contradiction concerning agriculture: despite its fertile land and capacity for domestic agricultural production, Lebanon imports 80% of its food, according to some estimates. The idea of boosting Lebanon’s domestic agricultural production and achieving food sovereignty is now conceived as an urgent necessity at even the highest levels of government. If food sovereignty is to be more than only a slogan, however, we must begin with a perspective from the Syrian laborers who produce the food that nourishes Lebanon’s citizens. Contrary to stereotyped media depictions of Syrians in Lebanon as hapless victims sitting idly in refugee camps, Syrians are a fundamental and valuable pillar of Lebanon’s economy, particularly its food system. While the Lebanese economic crisis and the October revolution have often been framed as national-level issues confined to its citizens, the story of Abu Sharif’s camp suggests that, in the struggle for a more equitable, sustainable food production system, the fate of Syrians and Lebanese is deeply intertwined.