"A Silent War on Life”: The Fight for Lebanon’s Land and Seeds

Zainab and Ali Mahdi, siblings from Naqoura, come from a long line of farmers. As children, they learned to care for the land, tending centuries-old olive trees, fruit orchards, vegetable plots, and bees on their farm. They sold fruit and vegetables along the seaside road, beneath a pine tree planted by their father. At home, they dried herbs, distilled rosewater and other aromatics — chamomile, rosemary, geranium — and prepared mouneh like tomato jam and pomegranate molasses.

“I inherited this path from my father, who inherited it from his father,” says Zainab, 51. “As soon as I became aware of the world, I knew my parents as farmers working the land and caring for our orchards. I’ve been working with them since I was young.”

Today, the Mahdis are fighting to protect their family farm from two enemies: one is Israel’s scorched-earth war on southern Lebanon’s land and people. The other is a subtler bureaucratic assault against their traditional practice of saving seeds. This multi-front war is threatening the existence of whole communities, the health of entire ecosystems, Lebanon’s food security — and the livelihoods of farmers like the Mahdis.

“If we don’t farm, we’ll die,” Zainab says. “We have to keep farming. We have to keep producing from this land. Otherwise, we can’t continue living.”

In April 2024, seven months into Israel’s war on Lebanon, relentless Israeli bombardment forced most of the Mahdi family from their land. Zainab and Ali were displaced up the coast to Sour (Tyre). At first, Zainab went back to Naqoura every day to tend and harvest the crops that were still in the soil: lettuce, cabbage, cauliflower, peas, broad beans, broccoli, onions, and herbs. Back in Sour, she sold what vegetables she could and gifted the rest to other displaced families.

By May of that year, Israeli forces were targeting anyone visible in the village. Zainab’s father Ahmad Youssef Mahdi, who turns 90 in August, pleaded with her not to go: “I don’t want Naqoura anymore,” he told her. “I keep my hand on my heart, waiting for you to come back every day. Khalas, stay here.” 

She stayed. On June 11, 2024, an Israeli drone attack killed her other brother, Saleh, who worked for the public water utility in Naqoura. Saleh Mahdi had refused to leave: he was distributing water to Naqoura’s remaining residents on his motorcycle when the Israelis targeted him.

The Mahdi family’s land survived the war, but not the “ceasefire” agreement. Between November 2024 and February 2026, Israel committed over 15,400 violations of the agreement, according to data compiled by UNIFIL and the Lebanese government, preventing Zainab, Ali, and tens of thousands of other southerners from returning to their land. Israel’s ground invasion of Lebanon in March, amid the US-Israeli war on Iran, displaced more than 1 million people.

The so-called ceasefire agreement of November 27, 2024 mandated a 60-day withdrawal period. During that time, Israeli soldiers entered Naqoura and bulldozed everything: hundreds of olive, avocado, and nut trees; houses, fences, and crops; and all of the irrigation and agricultural equipment that their father had spent a lifetime amassing. 

“Not a single tree escaped,” says Zainab. “We had olive trees that are older than 100 years.” (Her brother Ali says 300 years.) They even bulldozed the very soil — “not just into the neighbor’s land, but the neighbor’s neighbor’s land,” Ali says.

Seeds of Sumud

Among the many casualties of this brutal war: heritage seeds that generations of the Mahdi family had lovingly preserved and passed down to Zainab and Ali.

But Zainab found some solace for this loss in Seeds of Sour, an initiative started by the Union of Tyre Municipalities, which is housing many displaced families, including hers.

Seeds of Sour was designed to help displaced women make a living. But it is also trying to confront a systemic problem: the loss of baladi seeds. The word baladi can mean many things — indigenous, native, from the land. But farmers often use it to distinguish open-pollinated seeds from their hybrid counterparts, intentionally cross-bred for specific traits, often market-oriented ones such as transportability and uniform size.

Because hybrid seeds do not “breed true,” or reproduce the same crop as the original, farmers cannot save the seeds from year to year. Instead, they have to repurchase seeds every planting season — usually from corporations that exert monopoly control over pricing, and increasingly over farmers themselves.

Zainab has always been particular about her seeds. She prefers baladi seeds over imported hybrids and tries to avoid buying from large traders. Before the war, 70 percent of her crops came from seeds she had saved; she bought the rest from other farmers, nurseries, or agricultural stores in the area. Though she did not sell her own seeds, she would give some away to neighboring farmers. She also made her own fertilizers and compost to save costs and stay true to her father’s teachings on organic farming.

Most farmers in Lebanon have not been able to be as selective as Zainab. In Akkar, farmers have a hard time finding baladi seeds, according to Hanin Abdallah, an agroecology specialist who works with northern farmers through Mada, a local social and environmental organization.

To address this lack of access, Seeds of Sour set out to build its own library of baladi seeds to then distribute them to small farmers across the South.

“Our goal is to strengthen our sumud on this land through our food sovereignty, by having seeds that are saved and protected from extinction,” says Mortada Mhanna, the director of the Disaster Risk Management Unit at the Union of Tyre Municipalities, which runs Seeds of Sour with the Mahdis.

These days, even Zainab has to work hard to rebuild her collection of seeds. “I don’t want to say Israel destroyed everything,” she told us in January, “but we’re having to look really hard to find baladi seeds to rebuild strong.”

At Seeds of Sour, Zainab received her first batch of seeds from the Agricultural Movement in Lebanon (Agrimovement), which promotes food sovereignty by distributing baladi seeds to farmers. Two years later, Zainab oversees between five and 15 farmers, depending on the season, and is proudly self-sufficient in seeds. 

Seeds of Sour had entrusted local small farmers and municipal workers with a neglected plot of land. It was full of old tires, construction debris, and piles of trash — “like a landfill,” Zainab recalls. But together they turned the 10 dunums of land (about 2.5 acres) into a thriving organic farm that grows lettuce, red and white cabbage, cucumbers, tomatoes, bell peppers, spicy peppers, eggplant, zucchini, okra, mloukhiyeh (jute mallow), and much more.

For Zainab, the plot in Sour has become her land away from land. “I started saying this land is my own, I love it so much,” she told us in early April, as she walked around the farm in the spring rain. “When we work in the land, the land gives us strength, it gives us sumud, it tells us we are here and we’re staying here.” 

The Bureaucratic War on Farmers and Their Seeds

For Zainab and other displaced farmers, seeds have been a lifeline and a source of resistance against Israel’s ecocide. But in the fall of 2025, Lebanon’s Ministry of Agriculture released its Draft Law “Regulating the Trade of Seeds, Seedlings, and Propagation Materials.” 

The controversial proposal stipulates that anyone producing, propagating, saving, packaging, transporting, storing, or distributing seed varieties and seedlings would need to have them tested and registered with the government or risk fines between L.L. 600 million and 3.5 billion and prison sentences of one to three years. 

Kassem el-Zo‘obi is a vegetable and legume farmer in Saadnayel, in the central Beqaa. He grows his own baladi foul (fava beans), bazella (green peas), and onions, as well as imported hybrids of zucchini and bell peppers that he buys from seed companies. Sometimes, he also buys seeds from other farmers to grow heirloom tomatoes. 

As The Public Source spoke with el-Zo‘obi in late December 2025, a customer stopped by his house to buy baladi foul seeds. It had just rained in Saadnayel, the first proper rain of the winter, so farmers were ready to start planting for the new season. This meant el-Zo‘obi could finally make a profit on the legume seeds he had harvested earlier in the year.

Seeds are where el-Zo‘obi makes most of his profit. He prefers selling seeds from  his farm to selling fresh legumes at souk el-hisbeh, the wholesale produce markets run by middlemen in different parts of the country, because it earns him higher profit margins.

Lebanon’s nine wholesale markets are widely criticized by farmers as being unfair. Wholesalers operate on a consignment basis, taking a commission on sales while farmers bear the full cost of transportation and unsold goods. Most farmers have limited access to daily market-price information and must rely on wholesalers’ reporting of sales, creating an opportunity for wholesalers to underreport profits earned on farmers’ produce.

Zainab also avoids souk el-hisbeh, she says, because wholesale retailers pocket 80 percent of the profits and pay farmers only 20 percent of sales.

Selling dried baladi seeds to other farmers and local agricultural traders typically accounts for nearly three-quarters of el-Zo‘obi’s income. In the last two years, he barely sold any freshly harvested legumes. “Ma bet waffe — it’s not worth it,” he says. “When we sell the seeds later, at least we keep our capital. We don’t lose money on them.”

But if selling his own seeds requires registration with the Ministry of Agriculture, el-Zo‘obi doubts he will be able to comply. In 2024, he tried to register with the ministry to access occasional aid programs and low-cost agricultural products. Because he does not own the land he farms, he had to track down multiple landowners, pay fees he could not afford and navigate inheritance-related land disputes. Eventually, the red tape forced him to give up on registration.

Several farmers we spoke with also failed to register for ministry aid. “We don’t have the capacity or time,” says Zainab.

Under the draft law, farmers would have to renew registration for their seeds every six years. But if farmers cannot even register to receive discounted fertilizers, requiring them to register seed varieties would create an impossible administrative burden.

“I have to go to the ministry, take them to a lab, get them tested, come back to the ministry, see if they’re accepted, pay fees,” says Zainab, playing out the scenario. “Who of us is able to complete all these steps when you don’t know if they’ll approve them or not?” 

Farmers say the practical difficulties of registering seed varieties could pose a serious long-term threat to their autonomy — and to the survival of baladi seeds.

“We’ll start abandoning these seeds, because some companies will already have their registered types and you can just buy them. We’ll simply become consumers, we’ll no longer be producers,” says Serge Harfouche, co-founder of Buzuruna Juzuruna, a collective that preserves, multiplies, and shares baladi seeds. 

“This new law is for big traders,” says Zainab. “For us small farmers, it’ll be over.” 

The Legal Architecture of Seed Control 

Even if small farmers have the means and time to register their baladi seeds, they still might not be able to. The draft law includes what seed savers see as an even more serious threat: Distinctness, Uniformity, and Stability (DUS) requirements. 

These are genetic standards that a new plant variety must meet to be officially registered and protected under seed laws and other plant breeders’ rights systems. To qualify, a variety must be clearly different from existing one (distinctness), produce sufficiently similar plants (uniformity), and remain unchanged across growing cycles or generations (stability). DUS requirements are designed to protect the intellectual property of commercial plant breeders who work with hybrid varieties.

Almost all heirloom seeds and traditional varieties around the world fail to meet DUS requirements. “Automatically, baladi seeds will not meet the requirements,” says Harfouche. “As food producers, we will be forced to use seeds imposed by the [official] catalog.”

In their campaign against the law, seed-sovereignty activists like Harfouche, who have been fighting to preserve the diversity of local seeds, demanded the removal of DUS requirements. Following meetings with Minister of Agriculture Nizar Hani, and ministry staff and consultants, references to DUS were removed from the draft’s opening pages but remain tucked into Article 12.

There is a slate of problems with ushering in a market of hybrid seeds beyond having to purchase them every year. Although hybrid seeds can produce higher initial yield than baladi seeds, they often require greater reliance on chemical fertilizers and pesticides, which can degrade soil health over time.

Reliance on imported seeds, chemical fertilizers, and pesticides also increases the vulnerability of Lebanon’s import-dependent food system. Farmers generally acquire seeds through an oligopoly of agricultural input dealers, who in turn import seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers from a global market dominated by four conglomerates.

In just the last six growing seasons, Lebanon’s farmers have faced four shocks to seed and fertilizer prices: the 2019 financial crisis, the post-COVID 19 global inflation, the 2022 war in Ukraine, and the current U.S.-Israeli war and the disruption to the Strait of Hormuz trade corridor. On March 26, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) warned that the latter could increase global fertilizer prices by 15 to 20 percent on average in the first half of 2026.

Because commercially imported seeds are not tested before being released on the Lebanese market, farmers have also reported issues with the quality and adaptability of imported seeds.

“If the government wants to help farmers, it should provide them with baladi seeds,” Zainab says. “We don’t want hybrid seeds we can plant only once. And if the government can’t provide us with baladi seeds and plants, then let us do it.”

The draft law does carve out an exception to the registration requirement for “seeds produced by farmers for non-commercial exchange.” But the law’s vagueness around what constitutes “non-commercial exchange" leaves farmers vulnerable to penalties.

Farmers who don’t sell seeds, like Zainab, still engage in community seed exchanges with their neighbors that often include barter. Even if no cash changes hands, an exchange involving value could be interpreted as commercial activity.

“There is no such thing as ‘non-commercial’ seed activities,” says Kanj Hamade, an agricultural economist and member of the Agroecology Coalition in Lebanon (ACL). “Unless it is clearly defined, the non-commercial exception is too vague and untransparent, potentially exposing farmers to penalties at any moment.”

The Ministry of Agriculture has not specified how it would deal with such cases. “When pushed on how the law will affect small farmers, the attitude from the ministry is, ‘Don't worry, they won't be harmed,’” Hamade says. “But that requires a great deal of trust that authorities won't change course in the future when companies tell them that they should rein in seed-exchange activities.”

From Seed Laws to Seed Policing 

Since the 1990s, governments across the Global South have faced pressure from seed companies and countries in the Global North to adopt seed laws modeled on the International Union for the Protection of New Varieties of Plants (UPOV). 

Established by European plant breeders in 1961, and aggressively expanded in 1991, UPOV created the legal blueprint for treating seeds as private property. In countries that have passed such laws, farmers have faced criminalization and uneven enforcement.

Under the 1991 version of UPOV, companies that develop or modify a plant variety can claim legal protections that grant them exclusive rights over the seed for 20 to 25 years, a framework critics say privileges commercial plant breeders and criminalizes seed-saving practices that small farmers have engaged in for generations.

In April 2022, Tunisian officials confiscated around 30 seed varieties from a small farmer who was well-known for sharing local seeds, detained him for a few hours, and reportedly compelled him to sign a pledge to no longer distribute seeds. According to accounts shared by the farmer´s friends, the officials justified the intervention on sanitary and regulatory grounds. But the farmer and his supporters understood it as a form of intimidation and repression targeting local seed conservation and exchange. Given that farmers are not likely to report similar incidents, Tunisian activists suspect there have been incidents that went unreported. That same year, the Tunisian Permaculture Association cancelled the fête des semences paysannes, an annual seed-sharing festival, citing worries about the legal vulnerabilities surrounding the exchange or sale of non-registered seeds.

In later years, the association resumed organizing the seed festival without major incident. But Tunisian researchers and activists we spoke to say these events have taught them that enforcement is uneven, shaped by the broader political climate at any given moment. As long as the law exists, it can be activated whenever the authorities choose to intimidate or repress. “That is precisely why many people see the law not only as a tool of direct enforcement, but also as a permanent threat hanging over these practices,” says Yasser Souilmi, a Tunisian researcher specializing in food sovereignty. 

In Indonesia, local subsidiaries of multinational seed companies have used  similar seed laws to sue farmers for alleged infringement of intellectual property rights, resulting in conviction and jail sentences.

Trade liberalization often drives the adoption and enforcement of seed-protection regimes. Both Egypt and Tunisia, for example, joined UPOV in 2019 and 2003, respectively, as part of commitments tied to the European Free Trade Association framework. The EU has been pushing Lebanon to accede to UPOV since its 2002 Euro-Mediterranean association agreement with Lebanon, which entered into force in 2006.

During his term as U.N. Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food (2020–2026), Michael Fakhri repeatedly urged governments not to make UPOV membership a condition of regional or bilateral trade agreements, and to remove such provisions from existing agreements. Fakhri argued that UPOV undermines farmer seed systems that are vital to food security, rural livelihoods, and the protection of biodiversity. In a December 2021 report to the U.N. Human Rights Council, Fakhri wrote that the United States and the European Union have pressured developing countries through trade agreements to ratify the 1991 version of UPOV and adopt legislation compliant with that version. “This type of pressure hardly presents the countries of the global South with a real choice,” he wrote.

The pressure to adopt UPOV rules is not always overt. As Fakhri notes, high-income countries often urge ready-made plant-protection agreements on smaller countries through “capacity-building” or “technical assistance.” Whether that is what happened in Lebanon is unclear. But in 2023, Lebanon’s Ministry of Agriculture received technical support in drafting the law from the Italy-based branch of the International Centre for Advanced Mediterranean Agronomic Studies (CIHEAM), an intergovernmental organization composed of 13 member states. 

From 2023 to 2025, CIHEAM worked with Lebanon’s Ministry of Agriculture and LARI through Seed Lebanon, a €1 million project, funded by the Italian government, for “enhancing the seed certification system in Lebanon” and assisting farmers and the private sector to adopt “properly tested seeds.” In an October 2025 email reviewed by The Public Source, the Ministry of Agriculture said it prepared the law “in collaboration with CIHEAM-Bari.”

So far, Lebanon has not joined the 77 member states of UPOV. But its draft law adopts key UPOV rules. “The draft law leans toward an industrial agricultural model inspired by the UPOV Convention,” Lebanon’s National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) wrote in a strongly worded opinion issued last November, “focusing on protecting the rights of commercial breeders through registration and certification systems based on uniformity and stability, while excluding traditional and local seeds from the legal framework.”

The NHRC, which is state-funded but mandated to conduct independent human rights assessments, recommended that Lebanon “not accede to the UPOV Convention or any similar non-UN treaty before an independent human rights and socio-economic impact assessment is conducted.”

The Corporate Capture of Agriculture

But foreign trade partners are not the only ones pushing for UPOV-inspired seed laws. In Egypt, domestic seed companies and the export lobby pushed for UPOV accession in 2019. “Domestic seed companies believed they would benefit, as the middlemen for large multinationals like Bayer, if they entered the Egyptian market,” says Saker el-Nour, a rural sociologist who works on food sovereignty.

In Lebanon, one of the law’s most prominent supporters is Anis Haddad, founder and managing director of Seed Bound, one of the few Lebanese companies producing seeds internationally.

Haddad has been lobbying agriculture ministers to pass a seed law since the late 1990s.“Every year when I follow up, they pull it out of the drawer, send it to the ministry’s legal committee, work on it a bit,” Haddad told The Public Source. That changed under Agriculture Minister Nizar Hani. “When he became minister, he immediately contacted me and told me, ‘Anis, do you remember we used to talk about a seed law?’” Haddad says. “I told him, I’ve been talking about this for a long time.” Hani, for his part, praised Haddad at a national roundtable organized by the ministry and CIHEAM-Bari in November 2025 to discuss the draft seed law.

Haddad started his agribusiness career in 1981. He worked for major seed companies during their heyday, including Petoseed and Asgrow. Both were later purchased by Seminis, then bought by Monsanto, and finally absorbed by Bayer — today the world’s largest commercial seed company, controlling about 23 percent of the market. In 1999, Haddad and some colleagues left Seminis to form a Lebanese branch of US Agriseeds. A decade later, when US Agriseeds shut down its Lebanon operation, Haddad bought the local legal entity and relaunched it as Seed Bound.

According to Haddad, international seed production companies have long benefited from the lack of a seed-governance framework in Lebanon. Without legal protections, he says, companies could take baladi varieties, hybridize them, and sell them back to farmers.

“I can tell you because I played a role in that,” Haddad says: in the 1980s, he sent samples of baladi cucumbers to Petoseed, a major global player in vegetable seed breeding at the time. He went to the original Dabbous in Msaytbeh, got a handful of seeds for 10 liras, and sent them to Petoseed’s US office. The company then used them to develop hybrids that it sold back to Lebanese farmers.

“Now everybody plants these hybrids, they’re called khyar shamse,” he says. “It’s from khyar el-kahhal. It’s stolen.” In a later interview, Haddad clarified that this kind of appropriation of indigenous genetic material is not technically stealing, because no law prohibited it then, or now. That, he argues, is precisely why he is pushing for the current proposed seed law.

Today, Seed Bound works with farmers and local seed-production companies in 18 locations worldwide to produce hybrid seeds for sale inside Lebanon. Farmers grow seed crops in New Zealand (red beets), the U.S. (beans), India, Peru, Ecuador, Thailand, and China. 

Depending on the crop type, farmers pollinate in the field, either with bees or manually, a labor-intensive and skilled process. After harvest, growers send the seeds to Lebanon for cleaning; Seed Bound then ships them to the United States for genetic testing, then back to Lebanon for sale.

According to Haddad, Seed Bound cannot work with farmers in Lebanon because there is no legal framework protecting the company's intellectual property, or what he calls its “genetic ownership.” He also cites land constraints and climate considerations.

Yet Haddad envisions moving some of his company’s seed production to Lebanon — if the law is passed. His vision rests on transforming farmers from independent producers to contract farmers, an arrangement where farmers agree in advance to produce a certain crop or livestock for a specific buyer under agreed terms.

Haddad imagines a future where Lebanese farmers grow seeds for global corporations like Syngenta, the world’s largest producer of chemical pesticides and third largest producer of seeds. “Why would they go to India to sign contracts with farmers to produce their seeds?” he says. “We can attract them to come here. It’s contractual farming for farmers — it’s guaranteed payment for them.” 

Proponents of contract farming argue that it reduces farmers’ income uncertainty. In practice, however, contract arrangements introduce other uncertainties (fertilizer costs, for example), while also reducing farmers to laborers on their own land and forcing them to follow corporate dictates on seed choices, chemical inputs, and production methods.

In India, researchers found that contracts between PepsiCo and small potato farmers were highly unfair, giving farmers little leverage in negotiations over pricing and production. In West Bengal, contract farming with PepsiCo forced small farmers to resort more frequently to local money-lenders and pay higher interest rates to buy chemical inputs and machinery. Farmers said PepsiCo’s right to reject their products over quality control was more stressful for them than market fluctuations had been when they worked independently.

This power imbalance makes independent farmers wary of entering such contracts. In 2020, after the Indian government passed three controversial agriculture laws that would have expanded contract farming, among other things, farmers organized what became the world’s largest farmer uprising in recent history. After 16 months of protest, during which at least nine people died, the farmers got the laws repealed. (In 2025, with lobbying from leading seed companies, India’s government quietly introduced a new draft seed law.)

When we asked Haddad about the harms to farmers contracted to powerful corporations, and pointed out farmers’ concerns, he said that farmers, NGOs, and activists are being manipulated by politicians from the “deep state” who do not want a scientific approach. “Nobody wants the ministry to be in control,” he says. “They want chaos.”

In reality, the farmers and activists we spoke with do not oppose regulation. They also want stronger quality control of seeds — both local and imported — as well as tools to tackle false advertising. But they envision a legal framework that protects the rights of farmers and incentivizes the preservation of baladi seeds — rather than one that turns farmers into gig workers who grow hybrid seeds for multinationals.

Haddad says Seed Bound would not necessarily benefit from the draft law because it can already operate without significant oversight. Yet he also says that a regulated seed-production market in the country would unlock billions of dollars in research funding for the development of hybrid seeds.

Haddad argues that baladi seeds are “a mess” because they are “not genetically pure,” that local tomatoes are “trash,” and that the draft law will help farmers grow better produce. “Those small farmers you’re talking about, the old man in the mountain, we need to help him,” Haddad says. “His seed varieties are deteriorating and nobody is helping him. Educate him, teach him, help him advance, and let him know that there’s science, even behind local varieties.”

The farmers we spoke with already feel disempowered inside a system where middlemen control pricing and profit. They fear becoming even more dependent if this law passes. “Ten years with this law, we won’t have any local seeds anymore,” says Salem al-Azwaq, a farmer in the Beqaa. “The farmer will have nothing left in his hands. He’ll become just a machine among the many machines they’re inventing.”

For Azwaq, baladi seeds are inseparable from farmers’ autonomy. Seed registration is not simply a regulatory issue. He sees it as part of a broader shift from communal stewardship toward corporate control over agriculture.

“The difference between our local seeds and the seeds they want to impose on us to register is that seeds are supposed to be in the commons (masha‘), like oxygen, air and water,” says Azwaq. “These seeds are confined to them; they’ll give them to us in a dropper. It’s a war of weapons, it’s a war of starvation.”

At a public session to discuss the proposed law, organized by Agrimovement last December, one speaker captured the prevailing sentiment: “It’s a silent war on life, waged through seeds.”

Israel’s War on Food Sovereignty

The legislative assault on Lebanon’s farmers and their seeds come at a particularly dangerous time for the country’s food sovereignty and food security. Israel’s all-out war on life — human and non-human — has subjected farmers like the Mahdis and their land to recurring cycles of ecocide and occupation.

In its daily documentation of Israeli attacks on Lebanon since October 2023, Public Works Studio demonstrates that Israel has made Lebanon’s agricultural sector a central target. Israeli forces have used white phosphorus munitions on agricultural land, livestock, and poultry as a deliberate tactic to weaken the resolve of southerners who live off the land.

According to the most recent official data, as of May 4 Israel has damaged nearly a quarter of agricultural land “located within conflict zones in the South,” and 78 percent of farmers in the South remain displaced from their villages. “This amounts to agricultural extermination and ecocide by design,” states Public Works Studio.

As in Gaza, Israeli strikes have repeatedly damaged critical water infrastructure in Lebanon. In February, Israeli drones flying over farmland in southern Lebanon sprayed glyphosate, a herbicide that destroys vegetation, poisons the soil, and has  been linked to adverse health effects, including cancer.

Agriculture accounts for up to 80 percent of the GDP of southern Lebanon. Through its destruction, the Israeli army is sabotaging the entire region’s economic survival, states Agrimovement. The food sovereignty advocacy organization says Israeli forces have destroyed, burned, or stolen 47,000 olive trees and killed 340,000 heads of livestock.

Israel’s war has also affected farmers whose land was not directly targeted. In the Beqaa Valley, which accounts for 42 percent of Lebanon’s agricultural area, farmers spared in the 2023–4 wave of bombings still reeled from the war’s economic impact and market disruptions throughout the unilateral ceasefire, observed only by Lebanon, and continue to struggle today.

To avoid a surplus of produce he could not sell, el-Zo‘obi reduced his production, and with it, his income. He normally plants and harvests two seasons on the same plot. He starts early with a batch of foul, using the proceeds to cover expenses including labor, fertilizer, mazout, irrigation since rain has been insufficient, and imported hybrid seeds for other vegetables. A second harvest is where he usually turns a profit. Last year, he stopped after the first batch.

Before the war started, he sold bazella seeds to farmers in the South. He barely does that anymore. He also continues to struggle to transport produce to different markets. When he does get there, he says, people are buying less — only  the essentials.

Around 1.24 million people — nearly a quarter of Lebanon’s population — are expected to face “crisis”-level food insecurity, according to projections shared in the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report by the Ministry of Agriculture, FAO, and the World Food Programme. At that level, households are no longer able to consistently meet their basic food needs and may be forced to reduce the quantity and quality of food they eat, skip meals, or take on debt to survive. Those most at risk include Palestinian and Syrian refugees, people who arrived from Syria after December 2024, and residents of heavily bombarded areas in Bint Jbeil, Marjayoun, Sour, and Nabatiyeh, followed by Baalbak el-Hermel.

Economists and food experts warn that food insecurity could worsen significantly if the South — which produces roughly a quarter of the country's agriculture output — is cut off from the rest of the country, if Israel gains access to the Litani River’s water, or if it imposes a blockade similar to the one in 2006, when Israel targeted the airport and prevented ships from docking at the Beirut port.

While Lebanon produces a wide range of fruits and vegetables, it remains dependent on imports for key staples such as wheat, making it especially vulnerable to blockades or disruptions in global food markets. When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Lebanon was importing 86 percent of its wheat from the Black Sea region.

Israeli bombing also poses a threat to Lebanon's centralized seed banks. In September 2024, the Lebanese Agricultural Research Institute (LARI), located in Riyaq, a town in the heart of the Beqaa Valley, sustained damage from nearby Israeli strikes. LARI preserves and documents the genetic resources of local plants through the Lebanese National Gene Bank to save them from extinction. Local groups such as Agrimovement deposit seed varieties there, where the collection now includes more than 2,000 local seed varieties.

So far, the seed bank has been spared. Some safeguards are in place: copies of its seeds are stored in facilities in the U.K. and Norway, while duplicates of registered seed varieties are held at the International Center for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas (ICARDA) in Lebanon, one of the world’s most important seed repositories. Yet throughout October 2024, Israeli airstrikes landed near several ICARDA facilities in the central Beqaa.

The wars of the past two decades have repeatedly endangered seed banks and seed collections. In 2003, a U.S. military bombing raid destroyed Iraq’s National Seed Bank and many of the country’s thousand-year-old seed varieties. In 2012, Syrian militants captured ICARDA, forcing it to relocate from Aleppo to Beirut. Last July, Israeli forces bulldozed the seed‑multiplication unit of the only seed bank in the West Bank, which safeguarded more than 70 varieties of indigenous heirloom seeds, many of which no longer exist elsewhere in Palestine. 

In a region where seed banks are military targets, the case for decentralizing seed saving — long advocated by food-sovereignty activists — becomes existential.

Agrimovement invokes the destruction of seed banks in Iraq and Palestine to argue that “multiplying local stocks is vital to protect our sovereignty.”

For a food system more resilient to geopolitical shocks, every farm, group of farms, or municipality should maintain one or more seed libraries and receive state support for seed propagation, argues Corinne Jabbour, member of the ACL and a researcher at Jibal, a non-profit organization in Beirut.

Ali Mahdi preserves duplicates in different locations. After each harvest, he saves seeds for the following year, dividing the yield into batches and storing them in different places. “If one building is hit and the seeds in it are lost,” he says, “maybe God will protect the second building.” 

Seed Laws as Disaster Capitalism   

Israel’s war on food sovereignty makes it even more urgent to reduce the vulnerabilities of Lebanon's food system by supporting small farmers and encouraging seed saving and propagation across the country. 

Instead, critics argue that Lebanon’s government is following a disaster capitalism model — taking advantage of a crisis to consolidate corporate control over resources. Around the same time it circulated the draft seed law, the government revived a slew of legislation that would also affect food sovereignty — including laws on fishing, beekeeping, plant genetic resources, and labor.

As president of Agrimovement, Sara Salloum has been tracking these laws and attending meetings at the Ministry of Agriculture. What alarms her most, she says, is the current government’s effort to ram through a raft of controversial laws. “I think passing laws with this determination and speed by this government, which has a very short time anyway, is very dangerous for a country whose priority should be to defend itself,” she says, “not make itself lose more resources than it already has.” 

The seed draft law first emerged in 2021, at the height of the food price crisis that followed Lebanon’s currency collapse. It was proposed then by MP Ayoub Hmayed, head of the parliamentary committee on agriculture and tourism, a friend of Seed Bound's Haddad, according to the latter in his interview with The Legal Agenda.

If adopted, it would not be the first time a controversial seed law has been pushed through in the wake of war. 

In 2004, during the Anglo-American occupation of Iraq and after the U.S. destroyed the country’s seed bank, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority issued Order 81, a plant variety protection rule that favored commercial seed systems and constrained farmers’ traditional seed-saving practices. Order 81 was later incorporated into Iraqi legislation through Seed Law No. 50 of 2012 and Seed Law No. 15 of 2013, consolidating the rights of private breeders while marginalizing farmers’ informal seed systems.

For farmers like Zainab, on the frontlines of Israel’s ecocide, Lebanon’s proposed law would aggravate an already impossible situation. “Israel took half, and now you’ll take the other half, ya dawleh?” she says, addressing the Lebanese state rhetorically.

Seed Sovereignty as Lifeline and Resistance 

On April 1, 2026, Zainab Mahdi took a solo walk around the Seeds of Sour plot after a long day of work. She sent us photos of lettuce and sunflower blooms. In the background of her voice notes, Israeli warplanes mingled with birdsong.

“Today, I picked 200 heads of lettuce and 200 bunches of onions,” she says. “Soon, I’ll be picking the white cabbage; the red cabbage is already done. We still have some fava beans. We just ran out of peas.”

Two years into Seeds of Sour, Zainab no longer needs to buy seeds. With the help of the farmers who work with her, she has been feeding more than 3,000 people from those 10 dunums: During Ramadan, they supplied fresh vegetables to a local soup kitchen, as well as schools and shelters across the city.

Zainab is planning to share her seed stocks with southern farmers, so they can replant their own lands when the war ends. “We’re starting from scratch and collecting baladi seeds to go back, replant Lebanon, the South specifically,” she says. “We’ll grow back our trees and vegetables — all baladi, not hybrid.” 

Before the most recent escalation, her brother Ali had been making trips to Naqoura to rebuild his home; he was almost done.

“As soon as I get a roof over my head, I’ll work on my land,” he told us in January, speaking to us from his hometown. Today, he is unsure if what he rebuilt is still standing; it is now too dangerous to return. Recent shelling destroyed houses on their street. “The confrontations are happening there. And they’re plowing our lands. Yesterday, we received some videos of it. Everything’s gone, our orchards and agricultural lands — they’re not fit to be planted now,” Ali said on April 1.

Still, he is hopeful that he’ll go back and revive the land. “The land is everything,” he says. “The land gives you, the land builds you, teaches you, makes you as a human.” 

“Inshallah, we will go back to Naqoura, rebuild and replant and make it a paradise, even better than before,” says Zainab. 

With the escalation of the war, food-sovereignty activists have turned to providing immediate relief, such as organizing shelter-based kitchens and central kitchens serving forcibly displaced communities. They are also supporting small farmers, by sourcing from those still able to cultivate, and by providing direct financial support to those cut off from their livelihoods.

Zainab has started preparing for the summer season: bell peppers, spicy peppers, tomatoes, zucchini, cowpeas, okra, jute mallow, cucumbers, me’te (Armenian cucumbers), and two types of eggplants — mdaabal and long. Most are from seeds she had saved last year.

“Today, the shelling around us was intense. Some young women around me were scared. I told them ‘You’re the daughters of the land. You can’t be scared… We’re the children of this land, we’re robust and strong.’ They started laughing, said that I’m right,” she told us, her smile audible through the voice note. 

“There’s still fear, for sure,” she continues, “Nobody knows what’s going to happen, if Israel is going to get close ... Inshallah our young men are going to stop them and push them back ... We have immense faith in them.”  

“We’re also muqawimeen. As we farm, we produce food so people can survive and carry on. This helps us as humans, we’re doing something important in this life. We’re resisting, with the resistance … The land is giving us strength to stand our ground against the enemy.”

You can help support Lebanon’s small farmers here. 

—With editorial support from Christina Cavalcanti.