Re-rooting Lebanon's War-Displaced Farmers

by Marilyn Raschka

It's bad enough to be displaced, doubly bad when you are also misplaced. Lebanon's war refugees included its farmers. They too fled the fighting during the 16-year war. And they too took up "squatterhood" in Beirut, Sidon and Tripoli metropolises that had little to offer a farmer needing to support a family.

On my latest visit to Lebanon I met such a farmer displaced from a gorgeous bit of Lebanon called the Valley of Gold, a reference to the wealth of its agriculture. For the first eight years of Lebanon's civil war, this area of the Chouf, a hilly district southeast of Beirut, managed to contain tensions between its indigenous Maronite Christian and Druze communities, although they were on opposite sides of the fighting in Beirut itself. In 1983, however, withdrawing Israeli troops allegedly organized and armed local militias with devastating results. The farmer I met had just returned to his land last year to see what had become of his village and his terraced fields. He couldn't stay long because his job as a ticket collector at a Beirut movie theater required his presence at five in the afternoon.

When I asked him what was playing, he told me, "Twister." Hearing his tragic tales, that seemed like an appropriate title for the last 14 years of his life. Another farmer in this village had not been so lucky in finding a job. He and his family had to rely on his wife's poor salary as a teacher a position she was able to get and hold in a Beirut school. Others I have met through the years have had to live with and off of their grown children. This loss of dignity and self-respect takes its toll. A farmer without his land is a man without his soul.

One could argue that returning to farming should be a fairly simple move after all, the land is still there. Those who rushed back to their properties after the fighting ended in 1990, however, were sadly disappointed. Villages were totaled, terraces and groves and fields were mined, water lines had been wiped out intentionally or through shelling. For my ticket collector/farmer friend, neglect over more than a decade meant that his olive and fruit trees were half-dead. No irrigation and no pruning had taken their toll.

A long way up the power scale from these village farmers is Lebanon's minister of agriculture, Shawki Fakhoury. Before holding his present position Fakhoury was minister of transportation a prestigious post. The Transportation Ministry had a sky-high budget, as it included the renovation and expansion of Beirut International Airport. Fakhoury's picture used to appear regularly in the press as he flew in on yet another airline resuming air service to Beirut.

Limited Resources

Fakhoury's new position very much down to earth has put him in charge of an important ministry that has a very limited budget. Currently, "see Fakhoury run, hear Fakhoury complain" is basic reading in the Lebanese media. One headline ran: "'Return to the land' policy doomed to failure because of disappointing agriculture budget." Fakhoury said his ministry had submitted a list of agricultural development projects totaling 200 billion Lebanese pounds ($128,205,128) over the annual agricultural budget. He received LL15 billion ($9,615,384). He blamed the "financial [in]capabilities [of the government] and the decision taken to reduce the budget deficit" for preventing a bigger increase in the ministry's share. He said the small addition to the agriculture budget will be designated for extension services, medicines and livestock inoculation, and nurseries.

The agricultural sector received less than one percent of the country's total budget. Faced with this reality, Fakhoury said, "We will try....to implement a number of projects in this important sector without being able to achieve our famous call for a return to the land."

The worldwide decrease in farming has played out in Lebanon as well. Although Fakhoury claims that 40 percent of the Lebanese people make a living in the agricultural sector, a 1992 ministry study showed that only 7.8 percent of the active working population farms. (One can assume that as more farmers are able to return to their villages the disparity between these two figures will decrease.)

In other Arab countries the budget allotted to the agricultural sector is not less than 20 percent. Fakhoury called on farmers to understand the ministry's "limited room for action."

Picking up where the ministry can't are international organizations including USAID and the European Union. The latter is funding a $6,250,000 project to be carried out jointly by the Congregation of Italian Universities in Rome (ICU) and Lebanon's Ministry of War-Displaced People's Affairs. It aims to help people displaced by the war to return to their villages by offering economic programs in the fields of agriculture and by ensuring job opportunities for people returning to their villages.

The projected three-year project will include re-establishment of an agricultural technical school and the establishment of a model farm. Specialized training programs and practical applications also will be offered.

In terms of technology Lebanon lost a decade and a half because of the war. There were no fax machines and no e-mail in 1975. A good model of recovery, Lebanon's banking sector is already back in step with the rest of the world. But in agriculture there are major technological strides to be made.

Even basics will need to be taught.

In 1993 when I did a story on pesticides in Lebanon for the Los Angeles Times, some 300 pesticides, insecticides and fungicides were being sold on the Lebanese market. The government had just banned 77 of them, but ingenuity prevailed. "Sometimes they're labeled 'shampoo' and in they come," one American University of Beirut agricultural expert told me.

Even approved sprays are misused. Imported in bulk, they often are repackaged without labels or directions. The average farmer believes that if one dose is good, two are better. Protective masks and gloves are rarely used and the recommended delay between spraying and harvesting is often overlooked—farmers think the crops preserve better if sprayed just before picking.

Picking on pesticides isn't completely fair, however, and no one knows that better than the head of the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences (FAFS) at the American University of Beirut, Dr. Nuhad Daghir. "Let's face it, if it weren't for pesticides we wouldn't be able to feed the world today," he asserts.

What's required is educating the farmer, something at which AUB has excelled. Some 2,600 students have graduated with B.A.s and M.A.s from FAFS since it was established in 1952. The university's model farm in the Bekaa Valley affords the students a hands-on experience with animals and crops and agricultural problems specific to Lebanon and the Middle East.

Now, in addition to coping with the historical challenges of agriculture in the Middle East, these students, along with Minister Fakhoury and the country's farmers, must find solutions for newer problems. These include replacing lost and outdated farm machinery, understanding and adapting new technology, and, unique to Lebanon, returning the country's displaced and misplaced farmers to their valleys of gold.