Months after Sayyed Nasrallah announcedan ‘agricultural jihad,’ the party announced its third phase of implementation of the “agricultural winter hakura,” where resistance economy meets sanctions-induced financial crisis.

This last government, which resigned under the pressure of sabotage and stalling thanks to the US-backed factions in its body, had a cash-assistance distribution plan voted down that would, in addition to give 400,000 LL a month to most in need families while allocating some funds to the poorly supported agricultural sector. 

The strike down of the proposal, namely by the US-backed PSP and Future parties, signified an attempt at obstruction of any plans of assistance by the Diab government that would have wonpopular support for the first sovereign cabinet Lebanon has had. More than this, however, it had shown the ruthlessness of the United States and its allies to allow for the success of any sovereign project or organization in an Arab neo-colony.

The main dilemma remains the inability of there to be an agricultural economy without political transformation.The collapse of the Diab government, after 7 months of deadlock by US-Backed Central Bank policy and Western/Gulf allies in parliament represented the difficulty of attaining that government change in Lebanon able to change economic relations. If Hezbollah had shown success in mobilizing a campaign for agricultural development, it would have also highlighted an example of sovereignty and success in a country designed to operate independently-and more than a banking intermediary between the Gulf and Europe.

The United States has long stood to retain its position as the beneficiary of Lebanon’s agricultural market, especially at the expense of Lebanese farmers themselves. Along with The natural result of unnaturally transforming food production into a function of capital accumulation today is apparent in a number of contradictions: Lebanon importing apples from the US and finding difficulty in landing a market for its own produce, USAID encouraging the growth of avocados, a water intensive, trendy cash crop, or the higher value generated from land razed for empty luxury apartments than to feed an increasingly majority-poor population.

The greater geopolitical context that gave rise to this is nothing new. America had used and weaponized agriculture as a tool of imperialism. One farmer from the West Beqaa, recounted an exchange between the United States and late 50’s-era President Camille Chamoun where, in begging the United States to buy up Lebanon’s excess apple stocks, pleaded the US to “throw the apples in the sea” if they wanted to.

Likewise, the negative externalities caused by this labor arrangement have had their disastrous effects on labor and land alike. The penetration of a neo-colonial economic arrangement into the Arab world had its effects on proletarianizing the labor force in the Arab world, unsuccessfully attempting to absorb a historically and mainly agrarian population into an urbanized workforce. 

The result of this transition, serviced by neoliberal developmentalism, resulted from high levels of unemployment in the Arab world. In some Arab states like Egypt, these excess labor reserves, increasing after decades of neoliberal erosion of the formerly socialist, Nasserite state, were reabsorbed into a large, bloating military budget. Lebanon was no exception; outside of Beirut, rural regions have a near 80% dependency on agricultural livelihoods, despite the total current GDP of the sector amounting to less than 3%. 

Inter-Arab trade plummeted as a result of export-based commodification of Arab resources and economy. As Dr. Ali Kadri notes, conflict has historically predisposed the region to a destruction in the agricultural sector and severing of regional inter-Arab trade networks (Kadri, 2016). The effects of the war on Syria, a country that had been rural Lebanon’s closest regional agrarian trade partner, plummeted regional exports in this region to around 10%, whereas it had been about 30% prior to 2014 (Atlas of Lebanon, 2019).Nasrallah’s November 2019 speech, where he grounded the necessity of revitalizing the agricultural and industrial sectors in a geopolitical context, maintained that the reopening of the road between Lebanon and Syria and Iraq was critical to support the agricultural sector in Lebanon.

These disastrous changes were ushered in by the neoliberalization and financial restructuring of the post-war rentier economy. Since the immediate post-1991 era, funding from the agricultural sector has been diverted towards the reconstruction sector, to where in the following 14 years, agricultural funding had made up just 0.87% of the state budget according to a 2007 report by the Lebanese Ministry of Finance. 

 The capitalist transformation of the countryside furthered the erosion of agricultural livelihoods and their supporting institutions. Agribusiness came to dominate the sector, with most agricultural production oriented towards cash-crop mass production. Around the mid-80s, around the time inflation skyrocketed in the war-torn country, banana and citrus cultivation and production underwent a comparable increase, where civil war had oriented the country’s economic sector to export oriented production. At the same time, thedominance of foreign capital in the countryside manifested itself in the widespread proliferation of foreign NGOs that further encouraged agribusiness practices particularly during the mid-70s into the civil war era.

The geopolitical implications of development were evident in agriculture as well as infrastructural construction. During this year, the US directlyoccupied Lebanon, landing on Khaldeh beach at the request of US-allied President Camille Chamoun.The US sought to cement western friendly allies in the Middle East to cement support for the Baghdad Pact and crush the potential of both Nasserite and Soviet pushback in the region, particularly as the pro-Nasserite rebellion was strong (James and Leake, 2015). Accompanying the US’s cold war-era military occupation was the parallel so called “Eisenhower project,” a strategy of agricultural domination. As one Machgara farmer, a former schoolmaster recounts:

“America ruined our wheat agriculture and they fed the world with their wheat (exports). Before America flooded the Lebanese market with wheat Lebanon used to even sell wheat to Italy. America destroyed Lebanon’s wheat farming. The Eisenhower project would sell wheat to us in the form of food aid. Wheat was a commodity and it became very cheap. Whoever wanted it could just buy it. They would sell us wheat to beat out the Soviets and gain control over people and nations”

Public Law 480, launched in 1954, flooded Lebanon with 65,000 tons of wheat from the United States under the pretext of drought season relief. It was part of the United States’ “Food for Peace” program, which enabled “friendly countries” that were also “food deficit” to purchase grain from the US in exchange for allowing the US to outcompete and dominate these local markets.[1]

As mere middlemen in global capital exchange, NGOs, which included USAID, Mercy Corps, World Vision, and many others, were particularly instrumental in not only pushing agribusiness paradigms and models onto the Lebanese countryside, but also in incentivizing and pushing for petrochemical use.In compounding existing problems of nonexistent government support and little access to both local and international markets, institutions that should have served as intermediaries between workers and the state such as cooperatives, would end up serve little more than depositories for petrochemicals, a last resort for struggling farmers desperate to increase cash crop yields.

Fertilizers and pesticides have not only indebted farmers, but damaged Lebanon’s agricultural ecology. Apple crops in the North of the country sufferfrom Septoria, an affliction that has been affecting apple and tree crops in the West Bekaa and highlight the connections between intensive pesticide use and globalization’s incursion into Lebanon’s rural landscapes. The dimension of metabolic rift, that is, the extractive and degradation effect on nature capitalist production imposes upon nature as well as labor, is apparent in degrading soil, failing crops, and increasing instances of plant diseases.

These anxieties reveal the contradictions between a local initiative impeded by both nationaldynamics of government and the realities of international finance capital and foreign interests vested interest in ensuring Lebanon is without sovereignty. As Samir Amin argued in theory, a truly independent agricultural economyin a Global South nation must be preceded bynational sovereignty. In Lebanon, one wonders how long it will take to achieve the latter, and how much more sacrifice this blockaded transition must be borne onto the farmer.