- Title: LEBANON: Cannabis farms flourish while army looks away.
- Date: 21st May 2014
- Summary: BEKAA VALLEY, LEBANON (RECENT) (REUTERS) GREEN FIELD OF CANNABIS VARIOUS OF CANNABIS PLANTS IN FIELD VARIOUS OF MAN WALKING IN FIELD VARIOUS OF SPIKY-LEAFED PLANTS FROM WHICH CANNABIS RESIN, OR HASHISH, IS EXTRACTED (SOUNDBITE) (Arabic) LEBANESE FARMER ALI NASRI SHAMAS SAYING: "We want to live as everyone else does. If they want a confrontation that's no problem for us, i
- Embargoed: 5th June 2014 13:00
- Keywords:
- Location: Lebanon
- Country: Lebanon
- Topics: General
- Reuters ID: LVAD6MO0YZ7NSMZSVJZJ9FZ7C8F4
- Story Text: Driving around his Bekaa Valley farmland, Ali Nasri Shamas carries a revolver by his side and an automatic rifle in the back of his car, weapons he says he's ready to use if the army moves in to try to destroy his lucrative cannabis crop.
But he may not need them this year. With Syria's civil war raging 30 miles (50 km) away, Lebanese security forces have other priorities than their annual showdown with the Bekaa hashish growers.
"We want to live as everyone else does. If they want a confrontation that's no problem for us, it will be harvest season soon. If they want to come for us, they are welcome, if they want to legalise it, we'll thank them and tell them they are good people, if they want to confront us, they won't be good people but they will be gangs involving in problems with us and they are welcome," Shamas says, standing in a field of the green, spiky-leafed plants from which hashish resin is extracted.
Shamas has grown a variety of crops in his 135 acres (54 hectares) of fields, including barley, wheat, onions and potatoes. But cannabis provides by far the best returns.
It's also a hardy crop, well suited to withstand the unusually dry winter which Lebanon suffered this year, without the need for expensive irrigation.
It costs between $100 and $150 to cultivate one dunum (a quarter of an acre, or tenth of a hectare), much less than a field of wheat. At harvest time in late summer, farmers make up to $3,000 per dunum.
Shamas says authorities should take a step further and formally recognise cannabis as a legal crop - a move he said would have benefits for all.
"In case of its legalisation, we have no problem. They consider that the revenue for the farmer will be small, we have no problem. We don't like cultivating by force and making problems, when the state legalises it and gives licenses, as they do for tobacco cultivation, we would abide by that, and the state would receive (revenues) from us," he said.
Regardless what stance officials take, Shamas said he will continue sowing more and more of his land with a marijuana crop.
"Every year we are increasing the areas we are planting, we are doing what we are promising them to do. Three years ago, we told them we will plan double, we did and we will confront. The next year, we promised them we would plant five times that amount, we did and we confronted. And we will increase it every year. Either they provide an alternative, they legalise it or it will be a confrontation between us and them, we have no problem, we have nothing to lose," he told Reuters, adding that if they knew the state was looking after them, they wouldn't lift a gun towards a soldier, but if anyone from the state fights them, they will fight back.
In recent years, security forces have sent tractors, bulldozers and armoured vehicles to plough up, flatten or burn the cannabis crops, leading to clashes with farmers armed with assault rifles and rocket-propelled grenades.
Dramatic as they were, those shows of force by authorities achieved only partial success in a region where the state holds limited sway and even the militant Shi'ite group Hezbollah is reluctant to confront formidable local clans.
Since 2012, the campaign has been quietly shelved.
Two years ago farmers blocked roads when security forces started burning cannabis. The government backed down and the interior minister promised to look into compensating farmers for crop eradication and finding them alternative sources of income, pledges the farmers say have not been honoured.
Last year, as violence spilled over the border from Syria's civil war - with bombs and gunfights in Lebanon's coastal cities and rockets striking towns in the Bekaa - authorities called a halt to a battle they had waged with farmers since the end of Lebanon's own 1975-1990 civil war.
During that war, the fertile Bekaa Valley produced up to 1,000 tonnes of cannabis resin annually, before it was briefly stamped out under a United Nations programme between 1991-1993.
"We know that in the period from the 1990s until 2012, cannabis eradication took place on an annual basis and all the material, logistics, human and technical resources would be ready," said Colonel Ghassan Shamseddin, head of Lebanon's drug enforcement unit.
"But in 2012, in the regional and security circumstances surrounding Lebanon, the state decided to start cannabis eradication, some obstacles happened during the eradication, and then the subject was discussed on high level in the Lebanese state. The eradication operation was halted because of the situation that year on the Lebanese borders and the instability in Syria," he added in an interview in Beirut.
In practice, Shamseddin says that as long as the drug control efforts take second place to containing the spread of Syria's conflict into Lebanon, cannabis cultivation will be seen to be officially tolerated, at least by the farmers.
Economist Marwan Iskander said fully legalising the cannabis crop would help Bekaa and another impoverished part of Lebanon, the northern Akkar region, as well as contributing $400 million to the state budget and $2 billion to the wider economy at a time when Lebanon is struggling with the fallout of Syria's war.
"I consider that Lebanon needs this farming and needs to revive the Bekaa and Akkar regions. And according to my estimates, legalising the cannabis crop and its exportation abroad to the United States or some of the European countries where it is allowed, we would have $2 billion to the Lebanese economy and $400 million to the state budget. So really at this stage of our lives, it would have a big impact," Iskander told Reuters.
While conceding the idea was unlikely to gain widespread support, he said he had floated it to senior United Nations and World Bank officials in Beirut. 'They didn't say at the outset that this is going too far,' he said.
The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime ranked Lebanon in 2011 as one of the world's top five sources of cannabis resin. Shamseddin said official figures suggested the total area of cannabis planted has remained constant over the last three years at around 35,000 dunums, though it has fluctuated sharply in the preceding years.
In 2005, a tumultuous year when Syrian forces ended their 29-year military presence in Lebanon, 64,000 dunums were planted. That fell to 11,000 by 2010, the year before Syria's uprising erupted and Lebanon slipped towards domestic turmoil.
The long and inconclusive campaign against the cannabis crop, combined with recent moves to legalise the drug in two U.S. states, has led some prominent Lebanese to add their voices to the farmers' calls for cultivation to be legalised.
Veteran Druze leader Walid Jumblatt - insisting he had never smoked marijuana - said last month he supported growing cannabis for medicinal use, arguing that regulated crop cultivation would improve living conditions in poorer areas of the Bekaa Valley.
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