Thursday, May 17, 2007

As the army focuses elsewhere, Bekaa valley growers turn to an easy and lucrative crop, says Ferry Biedermann

Bombs have rained down on Lebanon in the past year and the winds of sectarian strife are still buffeting the country, but this is exactly the kind of political weather that suits hashish farmers in the fertile eastern Bekaa -valley.

"I'm going for broke and I hope that the country falls apart," is how a small farm-er near the hamlet of Alaaq recently put it.

The Lebanese army, already stretched by its de-ployment in the south after last summer's war between Israel and the militant Hizbollah group, is preoccupied with keeping the peace between rival political factions in Beirut.

Hashish growers in the region, once the breadbasket of Lebanon, are hoping for a weaker than usual annual eradication campaign and a good crop this autumn.

"I'm planting all my fields with hash and I don't care if anybody sees it because the army is too busy anyway," says one farmer outside the Hizbollah-dominated village of Budai. Instead of the 14,000 square metres that he planted last year, almost all of which was destroyed by the police, he is now planting 70,000 sq metres. "It's easy, I do it myself. I just throw the seeds out and by September I will have a beautiful field of hash."

In Beirut's Hobeish police station General Michel Shakkour, head of Lebanon's criminal investigations division and the official in charge of drug enforcement, says events are following a familiar pattern.

"They always plant more when there is political unrest or some big event," he says. But he warns that this may be misguided because the police are as determined as ever to eradicate the crop. "Everything is in place. We have our units who are responsible for this and there is no reason not to act this year," says Gen Shakkour.

He acknowledges that the eradication campaign faltered in the past "because of political circumstances" but insists that this year will be different. "The army has changed. They are more professional and they are still present in the Bekaa."

In a restaurant in the town of Baalbek in central Bekaa. a local drug lord reminisces about the golden era of Lebanon's hashish growth, during the years of the country's civil war in the 1970s and 1980s. Then, international traffickers used to drop by and smuggle out large quantities by boat. That stopped when the war ended in 1990.

Now armed and on the run from the police, the dealer complains about the lack of government investment in the area. "I don't want this for my kids. This is all I learned, how to grow hashish, and from there I started in the business. But it has been a tough life," he says.

The government has failed to invest in education in the Bekaa or to offer enough protection or incentives for farmers to switch to legal crops, he says. "Even potatoes that are imported from Jordan are cheaper on the local market than what we produce ourselves."

Hussein Haj Hassan, a -Hiz-bollah MP for the Bekaa who chaired the parliamentary agri-culture committee be-tween 2000 and 2005, makes the same point. He blames the government for lacking a policy and the international community for a lack of investment in the Bekaa.

A crop substitution programme by the United Nations in 1999 and 2000 failed, partly because of lack of money, says Mr Haj -Hassan.

However, the farmers also have themselves to blame for their impoverished circumstances, says Michel Afram, the director of Lebanon's Agriculture Research Institute. Hashish cultivation is easy because it demands neither irrigation nor much attention. Mr Afram is afraid that it would be no easy matter to restore the Bekaa's pre-civil war position when it -produced wheat for local consumption.

"First of all a lot of knowledge has disappeared over the past 30 years," he says. He believes farmers nowadays use inefficient ways of cultivation, including too many pesticides, driving up costs and making local wheat less competitive.

His institute runs a European Union-funded programme in the Bekaa to encourage "several hundred farmers" to grow capers.

But that's a long-term commitment, he says, be-cause farmers tend to lapse into old habits if not constantly supervised and assisted.

"They have to believe that hashish is finished now and that they have to grow a new plant."

By FERRY BIEDERMANN