GREEN GOLD

Pot Production Returns To Bekaa Valley, Lebanon, After 10 Years Of
Government Eradication And Poverty

When Lebanon wiped out the Bekaa valley's $500m-a-year cannabis
industry in the 1990s, it was a catastrophe for the impoverished
area. Its people are now returning to drug production to survive -
and are ready to fight the government to protect their crops.

High in the Bekaa valley, relaxing under a fig tree's shade, farmer
Ali pours glasses of tea. This year, God willing - and the Lebanese
army permitting - his harvest will be good. The spring rains have
been generous and now even the gravel at the roadside is flecked with
green. Hundreds of wind-blown seeds are germinating among the stones,
and those with a second pair of leaves have the distinctive
saw-toothed shape of cannabis sativa. "God planted them," Ali says
with a grin. But God did not plant what is growing further up the
hill. The two lower terraces have potatoes, but the rest - less
easily seen from the road - are packed with cannabis plants, still
only a few inches tall, but sturdy and growing well. It is on these
fields that Ali, his wife, his parents and his six children pin their
hopes for the coming year. Elsewhere in the valley, for thousands of
other families, it is the same story. The Bekaa - noted also for
smuggling and Hizbullah militancy - is returning to drug production
on a grand scale.

According to reliable estimates, 6,000 hectares (15,000 acres) of
cannabis have been planted this year - by far the largest amount
since the Lebanese government began its eradication programme 10
years ago at the end of the civil war.

For the farmers, illicit crops are a huge but irresistible gamble:
the difference between a comfortable existence and financial ruin.
Last year, Ali's neighbour got away with it and made $20,000 from a
single hectare of cannabis. Now everyone in the village is trying to
copy him. The risk is that the army will come with tractors to uproot
their crops and burn them. This usually happens in July - a month
before the cannabis is ready and too late in the year for farmers to
plant a second crop and harvest it before winter.

Last year, with only a few hundred hectares of illicit crops under
cultivation, there were armed clashes when the authorities came to
destroy them. This year, with thousands of hectares planted, there
could be serious trouble. "We are ready to fight the government and
anyone who comes here. We will fight for the food for our children,"
Ali says.

Dressed in combat trousers and a psychedelic shirt, with a chequered
keffiyeh wrapped around his head and a week's growth of beard on his
face, he looks as though he means it. There are 460 adults in the
village, he says, and they have 400 guns.

Dr Mohammed Ferjani, the Tunisian head of the Bekaa's UN-sponsored
integrated rural development programme, predicts a full-scale
rebellion if the illicit crops are destroyed. "The people are obliged
to search for a cash crop to ensure a respectable income," he says.
"This year, I'm sure they will fight."

So far, the government's response has been to drop leaflets from
helicopters. These threaten life imprisonment with hard labour, plus
a fine of 100m lire, for anyone found cultivating illicit plants. In
addition, any male or village guard who fails to inform the police
about the cultivation of illicit crops risks imprisonment for one
year and a fine of 2m lire.

The villagers' disdainful response has been to destroy the leaflets
or hand them in to Hizbullah officials. Despite being bombarded with
aerial warnings, the Bekaa's farmers are betting that this year, with
so much cannabis under cultivation, the authorities will not take the
political risk of trying to destroy it. But if the authorities take
no action there will not be a mere 6,000 hectares of cannabis in the
valley next year: there will be many times more.

Cannabis first came to the Bekaa from south-east Anatolya in the days
of the Ottoman empire, but the valley's subsequent worldwide fame as
a drug production centre was not based on any magical properties of
the soil or climate. Cannabis, as anyone who has experimented on
British windowsills will attest, is not a fussy plant. In the Bekaa,
it grows readily on hillsides without irrigation and with very little
human intervention.

It became a major crop in the Bekaa mainly for social and economic
reasons. Most of the inhabitants are Shia Muslims - a group
marginalised by Lebanon's Sunni and Christian elements over many
years. Ignored by central government, and with little in the way of
public services or policing, they did more or less as they pleased.
Then, when demand for cannabis mushroomed in Europe and North
America, they struck gold.

The first government clampdown came in 1963, with the ill-fated
sunflower seed project. The idea was to replace cannabis with
sunflowers, but without irrigation the yields were extraordinarily
low and the production costs extraordinarily high. To keep the
cannabis at bay, the government then had to buy up the sunflower
crops at twice the normal price. This continued until the outbreak of
civil war in 1975, when, with the collapse of central government, the
subsidies stopped.

During the war, the farmers reverted to cannabis growing (heroin
poppies also appeared for the first time) and the valley enjoyed a
boom, the like of which it has never seen before or since. Around
30,000 hectares of illicit crops brought in $80m a year for the
farmers themselves, but associated businesses such as processing and
distribution brought the valley's total earnings from drugs to an
estimated $500m a year.

Some of the money went on fast cars and flash clothes, but almost
everyone among the Bekaa's 250,000 inhabitants benefited - even the
conventional farmers on the valley floor. "High purchasing power
brought high consumption," Dr Ferjani says. "Butchers in Baalbek used
to sell 20 lambs a day - though today they are lucky to sell two or
three."

Despite the war, the cannabis trade also crossed the political
divide. One trail led from the Shi'ite farmers to Hizbullah's enemy,
the Israeli-sponsored south Lebanon army, and then to Israel itself,
providing many a happy daze in Tel Aviv.

After the boom came the bust. With the end of civil war, the Lebanese
and Syrian governments (since the Bekaa borders Syria) decided
jointly to eradicate the illicit crops - this time by force. In 1991
they destroyed 80%. By 1993 the illicit crops were down to a mere 300
hectares, and in 1994 a UN mission to the area found none at all. The
government did not repeat its sunflower blunder, and gave the farmers
"education and information" instead. The ministry of agriculture also
provided some cows.

"They promised the cows would give 20 litres of milk a day," says
Hassan, another farmer in Ali's village. "But after two months we
were getting only five." The ministry's calculations were for cows
fed on fresh grass, but there is little of that in the Bekaa, and the
farmers, far from being grateful, believed they had been lumbered
with defective cows.

The crop destruction programme may have pleased foreign governments,
but over the past 10 years it has succeeded in making the Bekaa one
of the most impoverished parts of Lebanon. The gross domestic product
in the northern part of the valley, where most of the drugs are
grown, is only $500 per person, while the national average is $3,500.

While the people look to drug production for their economic
salvation, for political and religious salvation they turn to
Hizbullah. Along the road into Hermel, at the northern end of the
valley, instead of the usual advertising hoardings there are
larger-than-life portraits of Hizbullah "martyrs" (men killed in the
struggle against the Israeli occupation of southern Lebanon), six to
a billboard. These are interspersed with even larger pictures of
Hassan Nasrallah, the party's leader. Even the telegraph poles are
painted in Hizbullah colours and carry its God-and-gun logo.

In Baalbek, the regional capital, the best and cheapest hospital is
run by Hizbullah, and the hottest nightspot is a Hizbullah-owned cafe
by the river where young men and women sip non-alcoholic drinks or
smoke hubble-bubble pipes (tobacco only, though it comes in three
flavours: apple, strawberry and honey).

Officially, Hizbullah disapproves of drugs and encourages alternative
crops. To limit unemployment (and possibly to prevent mischief) it
continues to pay the salaries of 9,000 guerrillas who returned -
jobless - to the Bekaa after the Israeli withdrawal from the south
last year. But to confront its core supporters head-on over the drugs
issue would be suicidal for Hizbullah.

At the UN office in Baalbek, Dr Ferjani displays a flowchart showing
that the valley's drug production and its political extremism are
part of the same problem. Marginalisation, poverty and frustration
are the causes. Tackle them, he says, and the extremism and illicit
crops will wither away. The key, he believes, lies in soil
conservation; better use of water resources; infrastructure such as
cold stores and grading centres for produce; and loans for farmers at
reasonable rates.

Water, people constantly point out, is the most expensive liquid in
the Bekaa valley. Bottled spring water costs 1,000 lire (50p) a
litre, petrol 850 and Pepsi 750. With Pepsi, you also get a free
digital watch if you buy 12 litres. In fact, there is plenty of
water: 40m cubic metres of rain runs off the mountains every year -
mainly in short, sharp deluges - and flows, unused by the local
farmers, into Syria, Turkey and Israel. "Under irrigation," Dr
Ferjani says, "any crop is more profitable than cannabis or poppies."

The solution may be obvious, but it costs money. In 1993 the UN
estimated that an investment of $30m a year for 10 years would solve
the Bekaa's problems permanently. "We would be able not only to
replace illicit crops but let the region return to the control of
central government and become developed without any prospect of a
return to illicit crops," Ferjani says.

But foreign governments are reluctant to provide aid to an area
controlled by Hizbullah. In the seven years since the development
programme started, it has received less than 7% of its total needs -
almost all from the Lebanese government and the UN. "Colombia has had
hundreds of millions of dollars to fight drugs, but the Lebanese
government is not getting support from the international community,"
Ferjani says. "It's the wrong approach. The international community
think they are fighting Hizbullah, but they are pushing the people to
be more extremist. We tried to explain to the Americans: if you
refuse to support this programme you are indirectly supporting
extremism. They didn't understand."