The Ground Beneath The Crop: Agrarian Erasure in Southern Lebanon (Part 2)

[This article is Part 2 of a three-part series on agrarian erasure in South Lebanon. Click to read Part 1 and check back here for Part 3 in the coming days. In the first part of this essay, the authors traced a century of crop substitution in Jabal ‘Amel, from the citriculture that Palestinian refugees helped cultivate after the Nakba of 1948, through the wartime turn to banana, to the avocado boom now reorganizing the southern coast for export. Each felling clears more than trees. A way of life is uprooted with the orchard. Here, that uprooting is followed into time itself, into the hours of a single farmer’s day.] 

Expertise as Violence

One of the local experts we interviewed working in the avocado value chain in Jabal ‘Amel, reports that in the absence of strategic institutional roadmaps, cooperatives and ag-extension, Lebanon’s agriculture economy is cornered into working “through global trends,” which now and for the past decade happens to be avocados. Conversations with him, other local experts, policy makers, and import-export traders pointed to fondness of this value chain which feeds both local and global “supply and demand,” more particularly global chains that Lebanon is pushed to orient itself towards. Avocado is seen as profitable with “good return[s]” for small and medium sized farmers. As such, farmer livelihoods are valued for their return on investment and purchasing power. Simply put: for the farmer to be able to buy more is a sign that avocado is a good value chain.  

In contrast, avocado cultivation occupies a largely unregulated and speculative space. As one agricultural value chain practitioner emphasized, Lebanese export crops including cherry, apple, grape, and avocado operate in the absence of coherent state strategies, varietal regulation, marketing oversight, or long-term planning. “There is no vision of the future for Lebanese avocados,” pointing to the lack of institutional coordination shaping these value chains. Avocado’s regulatory absence reflects its position as a crop without historical anchoring, whose governance is deferred to markets rather than historical continuity and embedded institutions.

For them, stronger state regulations of informal and formal agri-markets would help consolidate import-export channels and improve farming as a viable livelihood. Yet this framing disconnects the ecological and infrastructural deterioration caused by daily bombardment, the security risks farmers navigate, the strain on water tables and soil integrity associated with avocado monoculture, and the crop’s foreignness to the Mediterranean dietary ecology. While  the South was described as ‘frozen in time,’ its agriculture is expected to operate according to the tempo of industrial production - a rhythm set by export schedules, certification cycles, yield maximization, and capital turnover. This productivity-driven temporality, advanced through local-global organizational networks, prioritizes accumulation and competitiveness, even as it depends on and simultaneously obscures the precarious lives, damaged landscapes, and embodied risks that make such production possible.

This expert’s reflections fits a broader science-policy framework, the High Level Panel of Experts (HLPE) on Food Security and Nutrition (FSN) of the Committee on World Food Security^[1], that for more than two decades has been playing a critical role in elevating food system debates and FSN in global governance to the fore as matters that cut across ecology, economy, culture, health, and political power.

Importantly, in its latest report, Building Resilient Food Systems (HLPE, 2025), the Panel explicitly acknowledges the legacy of colonial trade, unequal exchange, and corporate concentration, noting that export-oriented specialization can undermine local food diversity, expose smallholders to price and exchange-rate volatility, and weaken domestic food production. Drawing on cases largely from Africa, the report documents how expanded cash-crop production has coincided with declining per-capita food availability, while sanitary standards, subsidy regimes, and the dominance of global value chains systematically exclude small-scale producers from higher-value markets. Additionally, it recognizes the erosion of local knowledge systems under colonialism, land dispossession, resettlement, and landscape fragmentation. It affirms that food literacy, beyond being a technical skill, is a land-based (“where the land is the source of knowledge”), intergenerational knowledge transmitted through families, elders, and culturally embedded practices, and that the loss of such knowledge undermines food systems. 

Donor interventions often lean on and are justified by HLPE and similar global frameworks like the UN’s sustainable development goals. While the HLPE points out power asymmetries, and the undermining of indigenous food systems, it struggles to fully acknowledge how agrarian lifeworlds are displaced through the very recovery and “resilience-building” architectures it helps authorize. Local knowledge is recognized, yet in practice ‘development’ is operationalized through increasing export-oriented production, donor timelines and agendas, and value-chain performance indicators that privilege market productivity while narrowing resources and displacing continuity, memory, and land-based temporalities.

What does it mean to have a market oriented outwards to meet the demand of capital and its accumulation, instead of urgent, local, and insurgent demands that would help people directly affected in a zone of dispossession? For Ramy Zurayk, a distinguished Lebanese professor and chairperson of the Department of Landscape Design and Ecosystem Management at the American University of Beirut, these are the natural by-products of this global colonial system where humanitarian and local agencies cannot, he writes, “think strategically in any sector, and especially in agriculture, without addressing the political framework all together.”^[2]

Interviews with Zurayk pointed to mode of production as the central problem rather than the cultivated crop type or its nativity. In Marxist parlance, Zurayk highlighted the need to deconstruct the processes of their circulation, alienation, extraction, and accumulation. Therefore, the metric by which any project should be evaluated, he argued, is not in the crop itself, but rather the ways in which its production figures in the common and collective struggle against capitalist designs and Euro American-led projects of regional hegemony.

It is in the turn toward export-oriented avocado monoculture that these dynamics reveal how power operates, if often invisible, subtle, discrete, and performative; manifesting through what is taught, learned, and marketed as ‘expertise.’ What strongly emerged in our field observations and analysis is that the authority to know and implement agriculture is determined by global trends which are implicated through anthropocentric and Eurocentric global designs. This regime of truth, of knowledge, of expertise is circulated and transmitted by  “experts” through donor-led financial literacy training, certification protocols, value-chain toolkits, and many other tools that authoritatively prescribe and proscribe what counts as knowledge and what farmers ought to do.

These dynamics were visible in the agrarian arrangements we encountered in Tyre. In some cases farmers were the landowners and in others the farmers cultivated land owned by well-established landholders engaged in import-export businesses. While many farmers maintain a deep embodied relationship with the land, in the latter arrangement their economic security remains tethered to the strategic decisions of the landowners. This kind of tethering reorganizes the terms under which attachment to land can endure, to be ultimately shaped by the demands of capital, its circulation, and accumulation. Economic security is structured through vertically organized relations linking farmers to landowners and to export channels.

Cut off from citrus and replanted with avocados and custard apple trees, the plot on which a farmer and his family work, and where they have built and sustained a deep embodied relationship with its trees, its soil, and its weather, is ultimately governed by decisions made elsewhere. The shift from lemon to avocado was not initiated by the farmer, but by the landowner, a well-established figure in his 50s who manages an import-export business in Tyre and oversees agricultural investments consolidated across his family. In conversation, the landowner described this crop conversion in parallel to his involvement in real estate subdivision and land reclassification, practices increasingly common in post-war Tyre, where agricultural land operates alongside real estate speculation and market calculation.

The institutional architecture surrounding avocado production becomes clearer in light of our conversation with an agricultural engineer at a local NGO working on the avocado value chain in Jabal ‘Amel. A shocking finding was that autonomous farmers can only sell their produce under two conditions, either 1) sell them to middlemen, intermediaries, or companies and lose most of their profit; or 2) obtain a certification to be able to sell their produce directly to export markets. Certification, however, requires capital investment, ongoing compliance costs, and is given by third party companies. To no one's surprise, this NGO co-finances initial access to the certifications through a series of training that include soil conditioning, fertilization, grafting techniques, yield enhancement, techniques to preserve fruit quality, firmness, and appearance, post-harvest handling and storage, and how to sort and grade by size and quality to comply with European market standards. In this configuration, agrarian change reorders agricultural practice around export readiness. Accordingly, local logics are constitutively imbricated with global imperial designs, (re)shaped and (re)formed by Anthropocentric and Eurocentric legacies and realities.^[3]

Could Time be Lived Differently? 

Time is a theme that emerges through the organization of work and the relations and arrangements that govern everyday life on the farms. What became apparent in the field, gradually, was that the form of time structuring agrarian life was no longer primarily agrarian, sacral, or mystical; farmers moved around the rhythms of labour - that is capital, its circulation, and its demand. This (Eurocentric) understanding of time and temporality was perceived as the hegemonic way of ordering everyday life. Using Baudelaire’s terms on the definition of modernity^[4] through time, we perceived a break with the “past” ways of life, being, and doing; an obsession with the “fleeting [present]” of the market, speed, and profit; and a focus on a linear progress of development toward the “future” through humanitarian (NGOs) interventions.

Moving away from the coastline, Jabal ‘Amel has a history of tobacco cultivation passed on from the Ottomans to the French to the current Finance Ministry of Lebanon, extensively documented as being implicated in the colonial and imperial designs of developmentalism, child labour, rural/urban dichotomy, etc.^[5] Temporality and its reconfiguration could similarly be seen in the case of tobacco farming across the mountainous terrain of Jabal ‘Amel. One example is our participant farmer Hussein. An old man who still harvests his tobacco and sells it to Regie with the help of his wife and daughter. 

Hussein speaks to us of, of course, the “old times.” Asking about his schedule of harvesting, he was peculiarly interested in speaking to the relation between the way he understood the Islamic rhythmic cycle of temporality in his village and farming tobacco:

“In the old times, even during Israeli occupation, we used to start work at 4 or 5 am… we would wake up, pray, sometimes in the mosque if it wasn’t that cold, and continue work until the dhuhr  [mid-day call to prayer] prayer time [around 11AM-12PM]… after that, time was spent with family, in the village, doing errands, visiting friends and family until the maghrib [sunset call to prayer] prayer time [6-7PM]… yes, that is when the day ended”

Hussein continued to talk about the present moment:

“Look, now, things are different, especially now… now I work mainly in the morning… approximately 8 or 9AM… I work a bit… about 3 or 4 hours and go home… What is the point of working when selling my tobacco is not worth it anymore with this economic crisis?… My son is in Brazil now and sends us our income to make it to the end of the month… kid, I only work to pass my time… no, no, it is not like before, it is not like before.”

Hussein speaks to the rupture of temporality itself. Nostalgic and romantic frames of the past, an alienated present sustained by the absence of a son in the diaspora who sends monthly sustenance, and a precarious future haunted by displacement. No matter how minimally we might define temporality - as rhythm, orientation, linear, or cyclical - it has implications for how life, labor, and social (re)production are lived. Thus, even a form of time that appears different entails a prescriptive understanding of self and its relations that remains unaccounted for in dominant political-economic analyses of agrarian life. What concerns us here, however, is the rupture of temporality Hussein describes - how time “was” organized according to the non-corporal, the non-material, and the intangible. At some point in our conversation, Hussein described his working hours as something “Islamic,” and after probing into that, he explained it as “not detaching myself from the commands of God… there is spirituality… I do not know if you understand what I am saying…” 

We cannot continue to evaluate agrarian shifts through humanitarian-developmental performances or economic metrics. While there is no doubt that certain arrangements are more materially attainable than others, we should not confuse this with their capacity to impose Eurocentric (violent) temporal orders, nor presume that market time itself is neutral. Key here is to recognize that (Islamic) cosmological rhythms, manifested through its different symbols and rituals, is constitutive of how farmers understand their relationship to land, labor, and community in Jabal ‘Amel. Accordingly, evaluating humanitarian-developmental projects - its apparatus of export schedules, deadlines, debt repayment cycles, and market volatility - should recognize their temporal disconfigurations across geographic sites of what Political Economist Ali Qadiri (2014) terms “de-development.” Time, in this sense, ceases to be lived as rhythm, tradition, or embodiment and becomes lived as orientation, disposition, and discipline.

This kind of “discipline” that emerges through both expertise and temporality is inscribed on the minds and bodies of the farmers; it “‘makes’ individuals,” as Foucault argues.^[6] What is lost then is not only a way of measuring time, but a way of inhabiting it, of organizing life, of cultivating a certain relationship with the past, with heritage, with the intangible, with the mystical or religious. In its place a new politics of the body emerges with its specific relations, alignments, orientations, and ends. The effect has been a pacification of farmers to the extent that if we define a farmer as a way of life (a self-understanding of many farmers), then this definition is largely obsolete in contemporary Jabal ‘Amel agrarian life. 

We sought to point to how donor funded humanitarian-developmental projects - however supportive they appear - are structurally tied to, articulated with, and operationalized within the wider political economy of war in the region. It is a continuation of violence and erasure through other subtle means. What follows, and what must only follow from this analysis, is the slow death of the fellah and the rise of the modern farmer.  

A farmer cut off from his lemons and replanted with avocado works land whose fate is decided elsewhere, by a landowner, a certifier, a market in another economy. The final part turns to the architecture of crisis that makes such arrangements possible. It asks what forms of life are being displaced, what dependencies are being produced, and what remains beyond the horizons of recovery and export.