Food plays only a minor role on the national balance sheet, where agriculture is said to contribute about 8% to GDP, and it certainly doesn’t figure with any prominence in the budget. With subsidizing sugar beets and tobacco, the only somewhat significant government funding support for agriculture goes to crops that in the opinion of numerous experts have no future. The agriculture sector suffers most from insufficient public sector guidance and support, said Ragy Darwish, agricultural resource economist at AUB. “The unclear policies at the ministry of agriculture are the main problem,” he said. A second main reason for the sector’s shortfalls were the long years of civil war, he said, adding, “infrastructure and institutions have been degraded.” But does that really matter, in context of the dwindling role of agriculture in the Lebanese economy? From a utilitarian perspective in the globalized age, food autarky is no longer the worthy
