[This article is Part 3 of a three-part series on agrarian erasure in South Lebanon. Click to read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series. The previous part followed agrarian change into the rhythms of everyday life. Through the figure of the modern farmer, it explored how expertise, development, and export-oriented agriculture reorganize time, work, and relationships to land. This final part turns to the wider architecture that makes these transformations possible. It examines how crisis, war, and humanitarian intervention create the conditions through which particular agricultural futures come to appear necessary, inevitable, and desirable.]
The Architecture of Crisis
When asked whether anything might be lost in the rapid expansion of avocado production, the local agricultural engineer’s response was immediate and almost incredulous: “Lost? I don’t think so. Not if there is good management.” The emphasis rested on technical optimization including certification, quality control, export readiness, and market access. Loss appeared as a managerial problem before it could ever be considered as a structural one. What happens if export corridors close? What if sanctions are imposed? What if regional instability interrupts logistics, certification flows, or cold-chain infrastructure? Questions we struggled to get any answers for. The primary goal for this NGO, it turns out, is building linkages of import-export, to “equip farmers with necessary equipment and gear to expand beyond the local market, so they are able to move and operate”.
Crisis becomes both the condition and the outcome of (hegemonic) humanitarian designed developments whose stated objective is to integrate farmers into higher-value export markets. As articulated in our interview, the local NGO positions its avocado programming as “opening opportunities” for farmers who would otherwise incur losses due to market saturation, intermediary exploitation, or post-harvest waste. Certification, technical training, sorting standards, and export linkages are presented as mechanisms to reduce risk and stabilize income under conditions of daily insecurity and economic collapse.
Subsequently, the apparatus of expertise being received, circulated, and implemented - fundamentally disembodied from place, needs, urgency, heritage(s), memories, epistemologies - ultimately results in epistemic hierarchies, ruptures, foreclosures, and systemic erasure. This micro-physics of “expertise” operates at the level of the body through “dispositions, manoeuvres, tactics, techniques, [and] functionings”[1] that orient practices, behaviours, bodies, and relations toward specific ends. It follows that promoting avocado cultivation (or any crop for that matter) in specific developmental and capitalist orientations are caught up in a system whose purpose is to (re)produce the global colonial order in which it becomes intricately imbricated with.
As we materially, epistemically, and affectively experience (hegemonic) projects of local-global developmentalism and humanitarianism in the Global South, particularly Jabal ‘Amel, analysis must attend to what it erases, the possibilities it forecloses, and the dispositions, relations, and orientations it produces through the amalgamation of power-laden agrarian “expertise” apparatuses. Surely, interventions disperse loans to support local avocado farmers, but they materially and epistemically erase memories and heritages of and around citriculture. They may improve (temporary) livelihood for farmers through petty cash, but they (re)produce the Eurocentric modern/colonial binary of the rural and the urban and thus the periphery and the metropole. And while they introduce new “modern” techniques of farming to enhance yield to land ratio, they alienate—and subsequently erase—the community’s lived archives, knowledge(s) and lifeworlds. In the final analysis, power-laden local-global projects curate, lead, support, and sustain interventions and are, at their core, entangled with processes of ecocide, memoricide, and spatiocide that operate with, within, and alongside the broader imperialist project of US-led “Israeli” (settler) colonialism, (neoliberal) governmental (racial) neglect, and the global capitalist world order.
Listening to what Remains
We have argued that local-global (hegemonic) agrarian humanitarian and developmental projects in Jabal ‘Amel are epistemic as much as they are social, economic, ecological, and political. Going beyond the debate of whether crops are native or not, we sought to make visible the forms of violence and erasure behind industrial labour. When agriculture is reorganized for global markets rather than local demand and continuity, what forms of life become (un)thinkable? Accordingly, it is necessary to centre the discourse of epistemic violence and erasure within civil society organizing, rights-based approaches, socio-economic and public-private planning, urban-rural and inclusive ecosystem design, interdisciplinary academic debate, and sustainable global policy frameworks. This requires two interlinked deliberations.
The first is moving away from Eurocentric and technocratic models of “expertise,” or the agrarian knowledge apparatus of techno-modern and capitalist designs which are imbricated with global modernity/coloniality. In a sense, it is the acknowledgement that development is not just development; it does not stop bulldosing after clearing citrus orchards, but continues its feat to reach the bodies, sensibilities, and dispositions of the condemned farmers. It is reckoning with the idea that agrarian modernization under humanitarianism and developmentalism is a serious hegemonic project of Eurocentric knowledge production in the region.
Second is a move that puts the farmers' lifeworlds, memories, and ontoepistemologies at the centre of our analysis and praxis. This act of listening, or repositioning, allows for a remaking of the agrarian question in Jabal ‘Amel specifically and the Global South more broadly, particularly of the rural farmer living under conditions of bare or non-life. Attending these should inform us of priorities, strategies, solidarities, imaginaries, and emancipations. Perhaps the ultimate question is not whether these hegemonic projects succeed or fail, but what worlds are (un)thinkable as farmers continue their pathways for liberation.
Further, conducting this research under conditions of war raises uncomfortable questions about both knowledge producing subjects and the production of knowledge itself. Many of the conversations that informed this essay took place while farmers navigated profound uncertainty about their future. Since (completing) this research, one of our interviewees has been killed in an Israeli airstrike. Others have been displaced from the lands they cultivated and spoke to us about with such intimacy and care, while the fate of other participants remains unknown. How does one produce knowledge in such a barbaric reality?
These realities compel a degree of humility. They force us to ask what kinds of futures become imaginable under conditions of permanent crisis. War does not simply destroy lives, infrastructure, and agricultural landscapes. It also produces deep disempowerment, urgency, and dependence. In such circumstances, promises of recovery and market integration can appear not merely attractive but necessary. The more precarious life becomes, the more difficult it is to refuse the terms on which assistance is offered.
This is perhaps the deepest concern raised by this essay. The danger is not only that humanitarian-development interventions may fail to address the structural conditions producing vulnerability. It is that those very conditions can become the terrain upon which new forms of dependency, expertise, and agrarian restructuring are built. Crisis becomes the justification for intervention, intervention becomes the framework through which recovery is imagined, and alternative futures become increasingly difficult to see.
Yet throughout this research we encountered farmers who continued to remember their dry fields and their thirsty birds, make every attempt at repairing damages, improvise, and insist on connecting to land, labour, and community. Their memories, practices, and refusals remind us that even under conditions of war, plunder, and dispossession, other horizons remain possible. The task, perhaps, is not to ask what development can do for Jabal Amel, but what becomes visible when we begin from the lifeworlds that have survived every attempt to remake it.