The future of farming will involve escalations of aquaculture and urban farming. These are ancient forms of food cultivation that are or can be decoupled from soil. As such, they have become increasingly viable and important in a world that has limited resources, while it is populated by billions of humans, in addition to the gazillions of micro-organisms that have always been around as the vast and silent majority of life species. Yet, from the limited perspective of the contemporary human specimen, we still associate the bulk of food production with soil-based cultivation. In this sense, one can think of land as the ultimate infrastructure of agriculture, the prefix “infra” meaning that what is beneath.
However, for our human ability to feed ourselves in the billions, rich soil that is able to guarantee subsistence to those who work it does not suffice as agricultural infrastructure (otherwise Lebanon with its soil and accommodating climate and microclimate situation would be one of the most food-secure areas on the planet). Agriculture in the 21st century involves and depends on a range of interconnected infrastructures, hard ones and soft ones, or in broad terms, on systems for the economic and sustainable production of food as physical and mental assets.
The overriding problem of agricultural infrastructure in Lebanon is the impact of the economic and social crisis in its manifestations of power cuts and water supply shortages. This combination of high cost and insufficiency in the most basic supplies is as debilitating as it is obvious for households, but it is also extremely bad for agriculture. This is because demand increases and supply bottlenecks for water, energy, and food can translate into destructive synergies where high demand for energy – a top resource needed in food production – and high demand for water, also a leading input – endanger food supplies and make food prices balloon.
High demand for food likewise can translate into price increases of water and energy, in a triangle of interdependence where agriculture and food production gobble up water and energy (according to some reports to the tune of 69 percent of global fresh water consumption and 30 percent of global energy consumption). At the same time, energy production requires massive water inputs, and some forms of water production are highly energy-intensive.
Not accounting and strategizing for what is known as the Water, Energy and Food Security (WEF) Nexus exacerbates the interconnectedness of water, energy and food production and can transpire as a fateful cycle of negative interdependence. In Lebanon’s case, understanding the WEF Nexus gives us the reason why the economic shocks of power cuts and the high cost and low availability of water translate into problems with food security. And that is even without mentioning other cost boosters, such as the suboptimal means of transportation and bad roads.
Delivering food to the markets
Getting food to the people in a market economy requires logistics and the expense of transportation costs. Spiking fuel costs are reportedly responsible for more than 12 percent of product prices on supermarket shelves (see interview with the director general at the Ministry of Economy and Trade in Executive’s special report on Food Security in Lebanon). But the transportation infrastructure dilemma is not only domestic, nor is it limited to a function of the fuel price shock that was generated by the withdrawal of socially and economically detrimental fuel subsidies.
The transportation problem for export-seeking agricultural and agro-industrial producers has historically extended to underperforming export infrastructures, most notably the vital port operations. Since 2000, container terminal construction and its development under a private operator at the port of Beirut actually was improving incrementally to a level of comparatively high performance, until the 2020 catastrophe of the port blast.
Although the blast did not impact the container terminal as badly as other portions, while a partial recovery of the container handling capacity was achieved within days and expanded over the following months, the loss of capacity was immense. This relative added cost burden on exporters, many of whom are agricultural and agro-industrial producers, has actually recently been measured in the performance rankings of container ports around the world.
A comparison of the World Bank affiliated Container Port Performance Index (CPPI), which covered over 350 large, medium, and small container ports, the port of Beirut’s CPPI position in the inaugural report of 2020 was very respectable, by a metric called administrative performance that saw Beirut in 66th place worldwide. Under a second, and perhaps even more relevant metric of statistical performance, Beirut’s container terminal even ranked near the top of the world – in 11th place out of 351 measured ports.
That, however, is history. In the 2021 CPPI, which was released earlier this year and is based on performance values in the year 2020, Beirut’s position collapsed to 356 out of 370. Some ports in North America and Africa performed worse – the Los Angeles and Long Beach port pair were the worst of all container terminals due to pandemic-related disruptions; reasons for the bottom performances of several major African ports were alleged by African and international media to point towards corruption.
But the blast-hit Beirut port was the worst performing container operation in the Europe and Mediterranean region for the whole year. The CPPI ranking of Tripoli port, classified as a small operation by global throughput versus Beirut port’s medium size, also deteriorated but by a much smaller margin, slipping from positions in the 60s and 70s, to positions in the 90s.
The performance of a container port is a major influence on the cost of shipping. This means that agricultural exporters in developing countries will see their international competitive positions suffer because of bureaucratic hurdles, and worsen further if the infrastructure in their main national ports is enmeshed in corruption.
Problems of corruption and bureaucracy were obviously not the factors that devastated Beirut’s container handling performance in 2020. But one has to assume that the steep slide in performance did add to the other cost drivers that agriculture and agro-industry has had to cope with; impediments that will persist over the term of several years, even if the CPPI performance values of Beirut port in the coming years will not remain as depressed as they were in 2020.
The granular picture
In the emerging post-crisis economy of Lebanon, one can also detect improvements of agricultural infrastructures. Springing up as renewable energy installations in rural areas, these improvements appear as evidence of agriculturalists’ coping practices in the short term but more importantly, they are promising with regard to the long-term sustainability transition of the sector. Renewable energy deployment, a prime requirement under a constructive strategy for taming the WEF Nexus and a core need for better management of climate risks in the decades to come, has in the past two years not been happening under governmental master-plans. Renewable energy matters existed before the economic crisis, but were aborted and for now can be judged with skepticism until they are fully and finally implemented. The overwhelming visual evidence can be seen during any excursions into rural Lebanon in the form of new solar photovoltaic (PV) installations and even the occasional wind turbine.
Moreover, renewable energy statistics by the Lebanese Center for Energy Conservation (LCEC) – a rare institution in that it has maintained a high profile of awareness building and apparent transparency – show that the increase in deployment of solar PV capacities in the past year has been the strongest in the agricultural sector, when compared to industrial, commercial, and residential sector deployments. Accounting for 17 percent of last year’s added total solar PV capacity, the agricultural sector leapt, according to the latest LCEC State of Solar report, from 10.33 to 15.57 megawatts peak.
New solar PV installations were implemented in all sectors, to an extent of an estimated increase – from the 100 megawatts that had been implemented in all of the preceding decade – by over 100 percent in 18 months from the beginning of 2021. This increase in renewable energy capacities happened with such speed because of the pressures of a vanishing state electricity supply. In the agricultural sector, informality is considered to be the highest among all economic sectors, and exceeds 80 percent. This could be interpreted as an example of the agro-sector need to replace Electricite du Liban’s power supply, which has led to renewable energy capacities being installed even beyond the measurable context of the formal economy, though not always in line with highest standards nor top efficiencies in solar electricity generation.
Such vagaries pale, however, against the certainty that in the past two years a litany of promises for an improved state supply turned out to be hot air. Public sector promises have lost every last ounce of credibility and the economic pressure of having to replace the absent supply seems here to stay, giving reason to think that decentralized renewable energy in rural economic use will grow stronger in the future. For the recklessly daring, there can be the additional hope that Lebanon, as a renewable energy republic, can achieve further dramatic improvements when utility-scale solar farms are finally realized, which would allow the impoverished population such luxuries as widespread usage of fridges and electric lighting, while simultaneously the country would be delivering on its Nationally Determined Contributions to climate risk mitigation under the United Nation’s COP framework.
While nurturing such dreams, the positive renewable energy perspective still cannot detract from the shadier reality that the problems of agro-food sector infrastructure do not end with transportation, export systems, and WEF Nexus problems that have been amplified during the past three years. There are also problems with hard infrastructures specifically for the agro-food sector. For example, deficiencies in the supply of cold storage facilities and lack of sophisticated agricultural equipment for harvesting and transporting crops at maximum levels of efficiency and quality preservation. This deficiency, according to farmers and agro-experts, impairs values of anything that is grown from bananas and citrus fruit in the lowlands, to apples and cherries that thrive, against an international comparison, at high elevations.
Stakeholders in the agro-food sector further testify to inefficiency, inactivity, and undersupply when it comes to testing labs and research facilities. Likewise, on the supply end of the food value chain, seed banks and nurseries need to be developed much further. In the matter of the most needed and potentially most useful agro-industrial infrastructure, special economic zones for agro-industry or any other manufacturing industry can be spotted in the Bekaa valley. And, to name just two examples of downstream holes in the food value chain, the producers on the farms are forced to contend with a systemic lack of fair and efficient market organization, at the level of distribution and wholesale.
This entire anti-system of dysfunctional infrastructures, which in soft infrastructures also includes paucity of vocational training, lack of insurance, historical under-investment and since the economic crisis completely insufficient access to capital, is too vast and too fragmented to be the result of some powerful conspiracy. The anti-system also is far too deeply entrenched to have been produced by the economic crisis of the past three years – which, by the way, had the ambiguous function of exacerbating the woes of agriculturalists and agro-industrialists, but at the same time opening new economic opportunities to agile stakeholders in the agro-food sector.
Digging up the GDP evidence
Short-term comparisons of agricultural export data between 2019 and 2021 show strong increases when seen through the lens of an internationally funded initiative called Business Innovation and Enhance Exports for Lebanon (BIEEL). Predicting an expansion of agro-food exports of products “in BIEEL scope” – covering live animals and animal products, vegetable products, prepared foodstuffs, beverages and tobacco, and animal or vegetable fats and oils – by $50 million at the end of 2023 in comparison to a 2019 baseline, the initiative said that exports in these four categories showed an improvement of $387 million: from $627 million in 2019 to $1.01 billion in 2021, a 62 percent increase.
However, BIEEL conceded that exports in the category of prepared foodstuffs experienced a juxtaposition of decrease in volume and increase in value. It also acknowledged that export achievements to EU markets have been limited by qualitative and quantitative restrictions and noted that 50 percent in agro-food exports in 2019 went to a total of seven countries, four of which are in the Gulf region and two in the Mashriq, with the geographic destination outlier being the United States.
While promising as indications of agro-food export potentials, such short-term numbers may be questionable from sustainability and data integrity angles. They also reveal little to nothing on the background and role of infrastructures in the sector’s efficient and sustainable performance of churning out agro-food products and delivering them to domestic and international markets.
Digging into the history of the Lebanese pre-conflict, conflict, and contemporary post-conflict economy uncovers how the present weakness of dedicated agricultural infrastructures appears to have been caused by the preoccupations with the development of mercantile services, especially financial intermediation. This is the known mindset of the post-conflict period of the 1990s which has lingered since reconstruction, and illuminates but does not explain the degree of attention that was withheld from the agriculture sector. This disregard for real economy can be traced through things such as budget allocations, investments, and the contribution of agriculture to the GDP.
The contribution of agriculture to Lebanese GDP shows a somewhat counterintuitive trajectory for a country that is part of the global south. The trajectory seems more congruent with a small and ambitious services-driven economy that has somehow not succeeded to break into the top ranks of upper middle-income countries. But perhaps the fluctuations in the Lebanese Gross National Agricultural Product (GNAP), as displayed in a paper authored by Riad Saade, the founding president of the Centre De Recherches et d’Etudes Agricoles Libanais (CREAL), have to be seen firstly in the context of a country that was at an epicenter of regional and geopolitical tensions during the Cold War, while also being situated in a bridge position between overdeveloped Europe, struggling Africa, and rapidly developing Arabia.
CREAL numbers say that between 1962 and 1966, the GNAP of Lebanon increased by 48 percent. This was during a period when agricultural productivity in developed countries was progressing by scientific leaps and bounds, due to the introduction of new farming techniques and high-yield crop varieties (wheat, rice, maize, and others). But shortly thereafter, at the time when crop yield transformations along with corporate dominance over agriculture were spreading from developed countries to emerging markets in the late 1960s, Lebanon seems to have experienced a phase of stagnation or stabilization. For several years before the outbreak of internal conflict in the mid-1970s, Lebanese GNAP remained approximately at the 1966 level.
From the mid-1970s, during Lebanon’s cantonization over 15 years of externally induced, internal conflict, the contribution of agriculture to GDP seems to have reached output levels never seen before or after. But in the waning years of the Lebanese conflict, GNAP crashed in 1988, leading Saade to conclude in his writings that destruction of the agricultural sector was taking place during the war. Indeed, a comparison of GNAP in 1988 against 1976 shows a significant drop, despite the peaks of the intervening years when agro output appears to have been easily twice that seen in 2002 or 2004.
The GNAP performance in the post-conflict decades has been fluctuating, with agricultural performance perhaps being in line with the volatility of GDP growth for the country overall. There was a relative peak in GNAP in the first part of 2010s, a crash in 2020, and a chaotic situation thereafter. The post-conflict period saw a country with population growth that was below that of many other emerging markets, especially that of large neighbors such as Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Iraq. Against this subdued demographic development, Lebanese agriculture approached a societal position emulating those seen in developed markets, but without the very high agro-food sector productivity gains seen in Western Europe. In summary, agriculture was clearly playing a lesser and lesser role in the priority lists of Lebanese political and economic decision makers when compared to services and financial intermediation.
The state’s relative disinterest in the achievement of agricultural productivity increases apparently affected both agriculture and agro-industry, which aligns with the narrative that all manufacturing industry during the post-war years was handicapped by increasing comparative disadvantages when compared to peer countries. On top of internal and regional economic and policy competitiveness impediments of all industries, the public administration and institutional integrity of Lebanon were sinking into patterns which were increasingly bad for doing business.
Corruption either had been present since Ottoman Empire days or crept in during the late 1960s, followed by bad institution building and bureaucratization, which in turn preceded the total absence of effective public administrative power from the agro-food sector in the 1970s and 80s, and into the 90s. “Since 1992, the launching year of Lebanon’s reconstruction, and until today, in 2021, the Lebanese agriculture has been literally ignored by the state of Lebanon and even considered as unnecessary by certain political currents,” Saade opined last year.
According to his more recent introduction to CREAL’s report for agricultural production in 2021, last year saw farm gate prices influenced adversely as well as advantageously by factors ranging from good harvests in Lebanon to a crop crisis in Syria which restricted outflows of produce to Lebanon. The combination of “random export markets” and demand conditions that were “shamefully exploited by the domestic wholesale markets” increased the sector’s fragility, Saade lamented.
Although the value of crops in agriculture improved by 19 percent between 2020 and 2021, they remained, according to CREAL, below the valuations achieved in 2017, ‘18, and ‘19. On the side of animal husbandry, the results in 2021 remained on a worsening trajectory, with a 35 percent loss over 2020 and a halving when compared to 2019. “This affected all sectors from poultry to cattle, sheep and goats. Only beekeeping benefited from an exceptional year in 2021, confirming the economic and biological importance of this production,” the organization’s yearly report on Lebanese Agriculture for 2021 said. In terms of total value of production in crops and animals last year, it stated a contraction of 8 percent and a continuing downward trend.
A good percentage?
It is anyone’s guess if agriculture will rise in the wake of the economic crisis to contribute more than the current 3.1 percent to the Lebanese economy – which must be assumed to have a very significant margin of uncertainty due to the informality in the sector. It is also anyone’s assumption what would be an optimal level of agricultural GDP for this country with all its historic and current contradictions and peculiarities.
There are 183 countries for which official but not necessarily perfect data for the role of agriculture in GDP – given the intrinsic weakness of the GDP gauge and the substantial presence of informality in agriculture that exists not just in Lebanon – is easily available. Among these 183 countries, the average contribution of agriculture to GDP is 9.9 percent (world average) and the median value, with half of the countries above and half below, is 6.4 to 6.5 percent.
Developed countries – whose populations may have suffered in their cultural integrities more than recognized in their decoupling from their agrarian and pastoral roots – are mostly in the approximate third of countries that show below 1 percent of agricultural contributions to GDPs. Some of the countries that achieve between 10 and 60 percent of GDP through agriculture, are tragically unable to feed and give decent livelihoods to all their people. Could there be a sweet GNAP spot, perhaps located somewhere between the global median and average rate for the ratio of agriculture to GDP?
The questions and collective human survival challenges that underlie the quagmire of what an optimal agricultural contribution to GDP might be, are related to the latter two-thirds of the word “agriculture”. Societies have to define what structures they want to exist in, and how far the “culture of the field” should take precedence over patterns of behavior that are detached from the land through a breakdown of societal communication in traps of digital anonymity, and the embrace of virtual dreamscapes fraught with dangers of isolating people from their social contracts and existences. All the while, globalized man is still caught up in old blind races for economic growth in industrial and also agricultural outputs which have contributed massively to the need for 21st century climate action and correction attempts.
Irrespective of the many infrastructure barriers that exist, the agricultural and agro-industrial landscape of Lebanon has been marked from the beginning of the crisis years with entrepreneurial energies (an energy that is not subject to the WEF Nexus dilemma) in well-established agro-industrial minds and a vibrant startup scene concentrated in highly visible innovation centers that have been supported by international networks, away from dependency on the whims of corrupt bureaucracies, dysfunctional institutions and an impotent state. How innovative agriculturalists, agro-industrialists, and vibrant entrepreneurial startups will prevail against rising global challenges is impossible to predict.
But even if they evade climate disaster, corruption and systemic perils, a wide-ranging infrastructure reboot is a change that has to come. This departure from the old system has to involve the state as a stakeholder and large international enterprises and accountable state-owned enterprises, and joint venture companies in the construction of strategic infrastructure assets from utility-scale renewable energy plants and strategic new grain silos, to distinct facilities such as functioning labs and affordable warehousing of harvests. It is the move from the infamy of an infrastructure that consists of nothing but gaps, to one that can carry agricultural production and reduce unnecessary losses of food.
