Food inflation in Lebanon has exceeded 400 percent since 2019, while prices of diesel and petrol have skyrocketed.
Bar Elias, Lebanon – A truck backs up with dozens of boxes of tomatoes, onions, carrots and peppers, and parks near a remote makeshift kitchen at a small swimming complex in Lebanon’s rural Bekaa Valley.
Omar Abdullah of Lebanon-based NGO Sawa for Development and Aid sighs as he reads through the receipt. “Food items keep getting more expensive,” he tells Al Jazeera. “The price of vegetables has more than tripled.”
Abdullah is running the NGO’s annual Ramadan kitchen, where a team of Lebanese, Syrian, and Palestinian cooks and volunteers prepare hot meals for 1,500 Syrian refugee and Lebanese families, and food baskets for others in the cash-strapped country.
“Even here in this building that is far from everything, we receive dozens of families every day asking if they could sign up to get meals at night,” Abdullah says, frazzled as he tries to follow up on food deliveries.
Running the kitchen has become extremely difficult; food inflation in Lebanon in less than three years has exceeded 400 percent, while the price of diesel for electricity and petrol for automobiles has skyrocketed.
Bread and vegetable oil – two key staples in Levantine cuisine – have especially become more expensive because of both the country’s spiralling economic crisis and the war in Ukraine.
In the kitchen, 60-year-old Om Mohammad is among three cooks who take the lead. “We don’t want to compromise the quality of our meals, so we’re going to prepare less than usual this year,” she says, pouring chopped garlic and cooking oil into large vats.
Om Mohammad, a Syrian who fled air strikes and shelling over Darayya near Damascus in 2013, has been working in the kitchen for nine years. “Even people from Beirut are calling us, and there are more Lebanese families who receive our meals,” she says. “I think their lives have become almost as bad as ours.”
More than three-quarters of the Lebanese population live below the poverty line. The country’s economic crisis also had a compounding effect on about one million Syrian refugees, of which 90 percent live in extreme poverty, according to the United Nations.
More Syrian refugees are going into debt to cover food costs, while health experts over the past year have documented major changes in dietary trends among impoverished families across Lebanon, including skipping meals.
The COVID-19 pandemic rattling the global economy further worsened donor fatigue for dozens of humanitarian organisations working in Lebanon, especially with refugees. As of April, the UN’s refugee agency in Lebanon has only been able to secure 13 percent of its $534m budget for the year.
While Lebanon recently reached a staff-level agreement with the International Monetary Fund for an economic recovery programme, and is slowly rekindling ties with Saudi Arabia and other Gulf countries that were once key economic patrons, analysts and officials alike have told Al Jazeera the crisis will take years to resolve.
Meanwhile, Abdullah is trying to find a way to keep the kitchen going and to serve food baskets to people far from the eastern Bekaa Valley.
“We talk to families and groups we partner up with in Beirut and Tripoli,” he says while monitoring seven men and women putting together packages with vegetables, cooking oil, and other items. “I don’t know, maybe we should find a way to start cooking meals over there, too.”
He admits there will be changes to the meals the kitchen serves going forward to cope with costs.
“We might have to reduce how frequently we include meals with meat going forward, so we can keep providing to as many families as possible, as long we find alternatives to keep the nutritional value.”
On this night, families will receive freshly baked bread instead of sfiha, a dish of flatbread topped with meat and pine nuts. But Abdullah and the cooks in the kitchen agree to alternate to make sure families are not deprived of traditional meals.
“The Ramadan kitchen is also to maintain heritage and tradition through the meals we serve, so we cannot remove these popular dishes entirely,” he explains.
It’s no secret in the kitchen that food inflation and funding have made it difficult for Sawa to keep up with demand for its services.
Om Mohammad says she hopes the kitchen can continue after a strong 10 years of public service. It’s also a livelihood for her, other Syrian refugees, and some Lebanese all living in nearby areas.
Akron has earmarked all its $145 million in COVID stimulus funds. Here is where it will go: Stimulus Watch
The City of Akron is ahead of many nearby cities, in that it has already approved how it wants to spend its $145 million in American Rescue Plan Act dollars. Though the projects have been approved throughout the last year, city officials gave a presentation detailing...
Apple sued by women over AirTag stalking
Apple is being sued by two women who say AirTags were used to stalk them. The small trackers are designed to be placed on wallets or keys, to prevent them from being lost. However earlier this year that several women had found unwanted AirTags tracking them. Apple...
China rolls back strict Covid rules after protests
China is lifting its most severe Covid policies - including forcing people into quarantine camps - just a week after landmark protests against the strict controls. People with Covid can now isolate at home rather than in state facilities if they have mild or no...
Meta threatens to remove US news content if new law passes
Meta has threatened to remove news content from Facebook in the US. It objects to a new law that would give news organisations greater power to negotiate fees for content shared on Facebook. A similar law, passed in Australia, led to news on Facebook being briefly...
Bank Morgan Stanley to cut 1,600 jobs
Bank Morgan Stanley is cutting about 1,600 jobs or roughly 2% of its global workforce, joining other big banks in making reductions as the economy slows. The news comes after chief executive James Gorman warned that the bank would see "modest" job losses. He cast the...
Civil groups file request for EU and US sanctions on corrupt Lebanese leaders
A Swiss foundation and a Lebanese NGO on Monday sought to pressure western countries into imposing sanctions on Lebanese leaders by filing legal petitions at the US Treasury and two European Union bodies, three years into the small Mediterranean country's worst-ever...
Our Businesses
Businesses We Endorse
Submit your event
We will be happy to share your events. Please email us the details and pictures at publish@profilenewsohio.com
Address
P.O. Box: 311001 Independance, Ohio, 44131
Call Us
+1 (216) 269 3272
Email Us
Publish@profilenewsohio.com