Changes in the Lebanese agrarian labor regimes in Lebanon after the Syrian crisis

Abstract

Population displacement in the Middle-East has constantly been a spark of heated debates on the refugees’ rights and the burdens the hosting countries are enduring, especially after the Syrian Crisis which drove 5.5 million Syrians into displacement (UNHCR, 2020). Lebanon is the country hosting the highest number of refugees relative to its population size. Being a country that suffered from numerous civil wars and wars with Israel, Lebanon suffers from security, economic and infrastructural challenges that are constantly impeding its growth. From the governmental perspective, Syrians refugees who mainly work in construction and agriculture, are causing major labor competition and pressure on infrastructure. Nonetheless, what render this context peculiar is that Syrians have always occupied jobs in the informal economy in agriculture and construction in Lebanon. In fact, Lebanese agricultural labor comprises only 3percent of total labor (ESCWA, 2013). Despite that, officials ignore this fact by claiming that the overwhelming trend in the labor market is “replacement” rather than “integration”. Using qualitative methods, this thesis studied the impact of the increased inflow of Syrian agriculture workers on Lebanese large scale and family farmers by highlighting the different forms of adaptations and struggles of laborers and farmers in these different forms of agriculture where tobacco represents family farming and citrus represents capitalist farming. In terms of the findings, the most substantial challenges the Lebanese farmer suffers from can be diagnosed on the level of production when it comes to input prices (for both tobacco and citrus), and on the level of marketing specifically for citrus. For both farming systems (capitalist and family), the resilience of the sector was proven by how each system coped with this influx: the allocation of the increased supply of labor was very fluid and adaptive to the innate traits of the present farming systems. This does not negate the differen