On April 26, the German Deutsche Welle news agency carried a piece by its reporter in Beirut, Katharina Kroll, headlined, “The war in Ukraine is driving hunger in Lebanon.” Kroll asserted that, “After years of political and financial crises, Lebanese people are now also in danger of going hungry. Germany has promised more food aid as imports from Ukraine and Russia dwindle.” Lebanon, she explained further, is in “a dangerous state of dependency – nearly all of its grain is imported. According to UNICEF, 80% of the wheat in Lebanon comes from Russia and Ukraine. Compounding this issue are skyrocketing food prices around the world and a lack of storage space for grain due to the destroyed silos at the port.”
Unfortunately, the war in Ukraine has indeed come at a particularly dangerous moment for Lebanon. The country is more than two years and a half years into what the World Bank said is a “Deliberate Depression,” the likes of which has rarely been seen in the modern era. The prolonged economic and financial crisis has caused the poverty rate to rise from 30% to around 80%, and that’s just for the Lebanese. The hundreds of thousands of Syrian and Palestinian refugees who were already overwhelmingly poor and food insecure in Lebanon are faring even worse especially as the Lebanese pound has lost more than 85 percent of its value in just the last year, significantly eroding most people’s ability to access basic goods, including food, shelter, and healthcare.
As a result, according to a January 2022 report by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation and the World Food Programme, covering the “outlook period” from February to May 2022, Lebanon is now officially considered a “hunger hotspot.” The capacity of Lebanon “to cope with, and reverse, the effects of multiple political and economic shocks since the end of 2019 has been dwindling,” the report warned, adding that the food inflation rate jumped a whopping 402 percent year-on-year. “Over 1.3 million Lebanese citizens, 35.8 percent of the total population, were estimated to be food insecure (including 190,000 severely food insecure) by the end of September 2021.” The prevalence of “moderate or severe food insecurity,” the report continued, “was estimated at about 23 percent of the surveyed population, with 70 percent of households worried about not having enough food. Nearly all the agricultural households surveyed indicated a need for assistance in the coming 3–6 months.”
“Beirut is running out of time, and it needs to act quickly if it is to stave off an oncoming hunger crisis,” agreed Professor Michael Tanchum in a piece last month. The Lebanese government, he pointed out, had previously relied on Ukraine to secure about two-thirds of its annual wheat import needs (50,000 metric tonnes per month), a crucial pillar of overall food security. But since those supplies are now less available, and since Lebanon no longer has the ability to purchase more expensive wheat - the price per tonne having doubled in the last few months - the country now faces the distinct prospect of even more of its citizens unable to affordably access bread on a daily basis.
Fact Check Assessment: True But Misleading
Still, as Sami Halabi of the Beirut-based Triangle Research, points out, it is not only the sudden Ukraine war that is now “driving” Lebanon towards a food disaster. “It was predictable. For decades, the international community has warned that without a real long-term food and nutrition security strategy, Lebanon’s next food crisis would be deeper and existentially damaging.” Sectors such as agriculture are so underdeveloped, he argues, that Lebanon imports many foods that are native to its territory. “Even simple measures have been neglected: Lebanon never instituted a strategic grain silo policy, which would have seen the country build and buy stocks (when prices were relatively low) to stave off shocks like the current one.”
Thus, although Lebanon is heading towards more hunger, and especially a bread crisis in the coming weeks and months, a key driver of overall food insecurity in Lebanon is also the longstanding, structural mismanagement practiced by the country’s leaders when it comes to preparing for periodic supply shocks, like the war in Ukraine.
