Reading Time: 8 minutes Lebanon’s ongoing economic crisis—an indicator of which is the increased cost of living at a time when many are unemployed or have seen their salaries lose a chunk of their value due to the increase in the foreign exchange rate and price inflation—has highlighted Lebanon’s fragility when it comes to food sufficiency, defined by the…
Lebanon’s experience with distance learning
Reading Time: 12 minutes As students across the world got ready for their first day back at school last fall, they could not have known that they would be spending almost all of the last trimester at home, communicating virtually with their teachers and deprived of the usually enjoyable social elements of campus life such as recess or after-school…
The impact of Lebanon’s economic woes on schools and parents
Reading Time: 9 minutes Lebanon’s fee paying private schools—which cater to 52.6 percent of the student body in Lebanon or 564,446 students out of 1,073,141 as per the 2018-2019 statistical bulletin compiled by the Center for Educational Research and Development—are in grave danger of falling victim to the ongoing economic crisis plaguing the country. As Executive reported back in…
F&B sector operating in constantly shifting and worsening conditions
Reading Time: 5 minutes It is a sad time for the hospitality sector in Lebanon, as we hear of the closures this May of Food and Beverage (F&B) outlets such as Hamra’s Dar Bistro café and bookshop, Minet el-Hosn’s upscale fine-dining venue Balthus, which had been in operation for 20 years, and Tawlet Hamra, which had operated for just…
Q&A with Kamal Mouzwak on the impact of COVID-19 on Tawlet and Souk El Tayeb
Reading Time: 5 minutes After being closed down starting March 11 for almost eight weeks, due to measures taken in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Lebanon’s restaurants were allowed to re-open on May 4 as part of a phased easing of the lockdown. To learn more about considerations F&B operators were taking into account before reopening, Executive chatted beforehand…
Growing trend of individual or community planting in Lebanon
Reading Time: 7 minutes As prices of both imported and locally produced food items continue to increase and Lebanon’s food security is potentially threatened (see articles on agro-industry and food security), the old Lebanese proverb “fellah mekfi, sultan mikhfi”—which roughly translates to “a satisfied farmer is really a sultan”—rings true. Knowing how and being able to grow one’s own…
Lebanese agro-industrialists discuss challenges and opportunities in times of crisis
Reading Time: 12 minutes Gibran Khalil Gibran’s poem Pity the Nation, published in 1933, could almost have been written about lockdown in modern day Lebanon. Most prophetic is the line “pity the nation that eats a bread it does not harvest.” Lebanon is indeed far from harvesting its own bread, given that we import 85 percent of our food…
Economic and coronavirus crises threaten Lebanon’s already fragile food security
Reading Time: 7 minutes For almost anyone residing in Lebanon, trips to the supermarket have become laced with a vague sense of apprehension. The more privileged may wonder how much the price of their favorite brand of imported cereal is now (as prices have been inflating since the last quarter of 2019), or if indeed it is still found…
Q&A with Nadine Khoury, COO of Robinson Agri, on how COVID-19 has impacted agriculture
Reading Time: 5 minutes Lebanon’s ongoing economic crisis has highlighted the importance of well-functioning productive sectors—namely agriculture and industry—to a country’s GDP and economic well-being. This was further emphasized with the COVID-19 global pandemic significantly slowing down trade, disrupting food supply chains, and forcing each country to think of its own supply needs first. Executive spoke with Nadine Khoury,…
LAU study on COVID-19 spread estimates extreme social distancing could save 150,000 lives
Reading Time: 5 minutes On March 19, the Office of Graduate Studies and Research at the Lebanese American University (LAU) released the results of a study (see below) on the effects of different levels of social distancing on the number of COVID-19 related deaths by June in Lebanon. One note of caution for these figures is that the lack…