Food System Resilience in Resource-Poor Countries in Conflict and Crisis: A Diagnosis of the Lebanese Food System

Abstract

Food systems thinking has overwhelmingly become recognized as the most effective form of holistically and comprehensively addressing issues within food systems and the systems connected to them. These systems produce social, economic, political, environmental, and food security and nutrition outcomes. As such, resilience has become a metric of measuring the strength or fragility of these intricate systems and their multiple interdependent pieces. Lebanon is a small, resource-poor and import-dependent Mediterranean country currently experiencing overlapping and reinforcing triple-crises in the form of an economic crisis, political crisis, and health crisis (including safety and security). The occurrence of these crises severely impacts the vast majority of the population of Lebanon and its food systems. This paper uses an established metric, the Tracking Food Security in the Arab Region food systems outline, adapted from the Food Systems Dashboard, to outline the Lebanese food system (LFS) and its individual pieces and components in detail. Next, 18 verified resilience and sustainability indicators with available data for Lebanon were gathered through a deep literature review, and compiled according to their relation to the Six Pillars of food security, as well as UN Food Systems Summit goals and UN Sustainable Development Goals (Table 1). With the knowledge of the cultural and contextual background of the LFS established, an analysis of the 18 indicators was conducted to assess points of resilience and fragility in the LFS, better understand how disruptions and fragility from the ongoing Triple Crisis permeate throughout the LFS, and identify potential pathways towards resilience and opportunities to bolster the LFS. Significant fragility was seen throughout components of the LFS through the use of the validated resilience and sustainability indicators, with frequent and common overlap between drivers of fragility: political corruption and mismanagement, currency devaluation, and social inequalities being amongst the severe inhibiting factors driving fragility in the LFS.