Ecological Knowledge and Skilled Labor Under Precarity: Agricultural Workers in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley

Abstract

Agriculture in Lebanon's Bekaa Valley depends structurally on displaced Syrian workers who perform most field labor. While existing research documents workers' economic vulnerability and environmental stress in the sector, little is known about how workers themselves read ecological conditions and coordinate practices under uncertainty. Drawing on eleven semi-structured interviews with systematic qualitative analysis, this study examines how displaced agricultural laborers develop and deploy ecological knowledge in everyday work. Findings reveal that workers read fine-grained environmental cues to guide irrigation, pest management, and harvest timing; continuously adjust task sequences to ecological thresholds rather than fixed schedules; circulate knowledge through selective channels shaped by trust and hierarchy; and frame decisions through moral vocabularies of responsibility and stewardship. The study introduces the concept of invisible ecological infrastructure to describe how workers collectively sustain farming systems through coordinated environmental reading, timing adjustments, and knowledge sharing—while remaining excluded from formal recognition and decision authority. Drawing on practice theory and moral economy frameworks, the analysis shows how these patterns constitute an integrated system of ecological practice under precarity. By foregrounding labor as an ecological force, this research demonstrates that displaced workers possess refined expertise essential to agricultural production yet systematically undervalued. The study contributes to environmental anthropology and agrarian studies by positioning precarity not as context but as constitutive of how environmental care is practiced and rendered fragile in labor-dependent systems.