Nearly 80% of households in Lebanon don't have food or money to buy food | Hacker News Reader

Nearly 80% of households in Lebanon don't have food or money to buy food

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114 pointstriple_m68 comments

Yes it's bad. It's horrible actually. Lebanon has become a basket case of a country.

But I think the headline may be exaggerating the direness of the situation. Yes it's bad but I don't think Lebanon is about to go into a famine situation which is what the headline portends to...

Source: people on the ground in Lebanon.

What stops them from fixing their food supply?

Corruption and lack of organization. Since the explosion the government and the ability to systematically get things done has basically gone to zero.

Lebanon imports food. Who will provide them USD or EUR? Sure, exporters can. However, whatever they export accounts for 10% of imports. Basically, other countries have to donate food to Lebanon at this moment.

Well, the currency lost something like 90% of its value over the last year since the blast. (https://foreignpolicy.com/2021/04/05/lebanon-currency-inflat...)

This April the black market rate dropped to 12,000 and caused minor riots. Now its at 18,000 and plunging in fits and starts.

The median salary is now something like $30 a month (down from $600 couple years ago). The army no longer being able to afford to feed its soldiers has resorted to giving helicopter tours to tourists (https://english.alarabiya.net/News/middle-east/2021/06/29/Le...).

There's gas shortages and riots everyday all over the place. This is Tripoli now: https://www.reddit.com/r/lebanon/comments/oaw4h5/tripoli_rig...

The foreign currency reserves have dwindled over the last year from $30 billion to $15, the minimum required by law is currently $14, and their very extensive food subsidies program is costing them 500 million a month and is about to be nixed. They can't maintain their electric grid and people get only a few hours of power a day.

Also this whole time there hasn't been a government. All the key players are corrupt beyond belief and wanted for either terrorism, drug trafficking or embezzlement.

Pretty sure they will indeed have a famine soon if nothing changes.

> The foreign currency reserves have dwindled over the last year from $30 billion to $15, the minimum required by law is currently $14

Is that $15,000,000,000 or $15.00? Just curious :P

Comments like these are generally not constructive to discussions. You are on the internet, on Hacker News, so I assume you’re probably living in a first-world country and completed secondary school or college. Which number do you think is more likely?

I went to Turkey in 2005. The 1 lyra note was also the 1,000,000 Lyra note.

One million lira was equivalent to one new lira.

Yes. I apologize for messing up the spelling. It just struck me as amazing that they still used the old bank notes, and just cut 6 0’s off for the conversion.

I thought the guy was talking about $15 too. I figured that they completely ran out of foreign currency.

Wow, that's bad, you think there will be a revolution?

This was really eye opening. Thank you for posting. In your opinion, what stops people from organizing to form a new government?

"Better to have a corrupt government than no government at all"

They should be concerned of who wants to buy the infrastructure at a reduced price

That'd be Russia and Iran presently (after failed bids by Germany and France to rebuild their port).

They should observe how little autonomy Sudan currently has.

> Pretty sure they will indeed have a famine soon if nothing changes.

Your reasoning and argument to suggest famine will befall the country is a non sequitur. You list a bunch of events and provide citations. Sure, these are fact. But I am not sure how a halving of billions of dollars of currency reserves at the central bank, for example, leads to famine in a country like Lebanon.

Don't forget that not too long ago Lebanon went through a civil war that wrecked the country - but there was no famine to go with it.

Nassim Taleb speaks a lot about "anti-fragile" - partly because he is from Lebanon and sees the concept play out everyday. That anti-fragility would prevent a true famine from occurring: a rich and extensive diaspora amongst many other qualities.

Very anecdotal but just today I was talking to a Lebanese person who is going home this weekend.

They said the situation is very bad but life is still some what humming along. They're going to a wedding next week and plan to go out and party with friends.

Maybe they're in the top part of society?

To be fair, just knowing foreigners is probably predictive of higher economic outcomes

I would imagine this to be equally true of Americans

There are entire countries living off Western Union. People in my country send food packages to the former colonies. And every summer tens of thousands of travel to Morocco.

I'm talking about just socially randomly knowing people from other countries.

It sounds like what you are talking about is more family\immigrant diaspora networks.

Different definitions of "knowing foreigners

Based on the way the parent said "a Lebanese person“ without mentioning a relationship I implied the former.

There are differences. For instance, filipinos or Indians working in the middle east, is different from filipinos or Indians in the EU/UK/USA/Canada--the economic status differs.

Even the people who go to middle east are in a better state than many who don't.

> Maybe they're in the top part of society?

People who are going home from foreign travel to a place where 80% have neither food nor money to buy it is, almost certainly, in an economic stratum several substantial steps above the middle, if perhaps not at the very top.

Wait a sec, this headline doesn’t pass the smell test. If you have no food, and no means to acquire food, you’ll die in short order.

So are we saying 80% of Lebanon households will be dead in (however long starvation takes)?

Or are we saying that they can’t get food meeting $standard in quality/quantity, yet are still surviving (albeit with nutritional or other drawbacks)?

The former. The situation in Lebanon is indeed becoming quite dier, any food people have is given/shared. The entire government resigned last year over the explosion. It's not a good situation for the Lebanese people and I'd imagine there are a lot of people who are currently dying and the situation will progress as you'd expect. DW (the german broadcaster) has done a lot of good reporting on it (youtube), I'd encourage you to check it out if you're interested in this. https://www.transparency.org/en/blog/cpi-2020-lebanon-system...

btw fwiw: the red cross has a specific Lebanon campaign: https://www.icrc.org/en/donate/lebanon from my googling around on what I could do, seems like the best way to help.

I'm not sure "best" and "red cross" go together in recent times.

But don't let that discourage you from supporting.

No, I wouldn't ordinarily put them together either, in fact that's why I spent an hour googling, but outside of red cross there doesn't seem to be that much useful to do.

What's so bad about the red cross?

Thanks for looking that up. I donated.

The article text "In total, 77 percent of households do not have enough food" doesn't match the headline.

Eating "not enough food" will mean you starve, but death by starvation can take a long time.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-long-can-a-pe...

> Unlike total starvation, near-total starvation with continued hydration has occurred frequently, both in history and in patients under medical supervision. Survival for many months to years is common in concentration camps and during famines, but the unknown caloric intake during these times makes it impossible to predict survival.

> If you have no food, and no means to acquire food, you’ll die in short order.

They only mention a lack of funds, but food is free everywhere.

The two exceptions is in war, where supplying food is often to hard. And mental illness where supplying food is sometimes too hard within the system.

> yet are still surviving (albeit with nutritional or other drawbacks)

This is the biggest issue around the world, it causes brain damage and early death to billions. Not the pressing issue in Lebanon.

Their language in the title is fine (it should include 'enough' money like UNICEF does), people understand the meaning, skipping meals, whether the 80% is click-bait is more of a question. But it is true Lebanon is in trouble and morally and for stability in the region needs help.

Read the real report - https://www.unicef.org/lebanon/media/6541/file

Nutrition is not a binary distribution of starve or not starve.

Can't afford food is not the same as can't acquire food. If the cost of a loaf of bread shot up to $1000, you would not be able to afford to buy food, but the food in your pantry would still be just as edible, hoarded food seized by either the government or local militias can be redistributed, and as you got desperate there are lots of things which can become "food." You mix some sawdust into some flour, boil some shoe leather, hunt some rodents, slaughter some pets... look at places like Leningrad in WW2 to see populations going years without a functioning food market.

One can live with one meal, water and salt for many days. That's how people in old days used to survive during droughts.

I was curious about the quotation from the linked article that says: "The World Bank has described what is happening in Lebanon as possibly one of the top three economic collapses seen since the mid 19th Century."

It turns out that's in reference to the Reinhart and Rogoff "100 episodes" paper, which focused on examples of historical financial crises in largely western countries. Stalin's push for collectivization, Mao's great leap forward, etc. aren't included in that study. So the World Bank isn't implying that the current situation is as dire as those kinds of situations.

50,000 people petitioned France last year to recolonise the country:

https://www.euronews.com/2020/08/06/over-50-00-sign-petition...

Why would they want to be colonized?

Presumably to be under the control of a less corrupt and more capable government?

And what would France get in return?

A basket case, which people will blame France for when it can't be fixed. Plus a battle for influence with Iran.

If I were France, I wouldn't touch it with a 10-meter pole.

(Completely off topic: I have seen a literal 10-foot pole. It had a hypodermic needle on one end. It was used to tranquilize a skunk caught in a (humane) trap, without getting sprayed.)

>A basket case, which people will blame France for when it can't be fixed. Plus a battle for influence with Iran.

You can add more Islamic terrorism in the future in mainland France.

In the 80's Lebanon was also a bit of a crazy place, I remember seeing pictures of American battleships firing into the mainland to attack enemy militias, which kinda reminded me of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness and thinking that place will never be stable. Looks like I was wrong up until a few years ago though, it's a real shame for the people there.

https://www.nytimes.com/1983/09/20/world/us-warships-fire-in...

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombing...

I bet both France and the US will run the other way. The above is another thing that happened during that era. Hundreds dead.

I was just a really young kid but even I remember it.

However if you reference it a decade earlier you find female rock bands smoking hashish after a gig, etc. I’ll not be so simplistic as to blame a particular power, but the place was dismantled, and didn’t just fall apart. Regardless of Roman and Ottoman provincial divisions, it ended up an accidental buffer zone. Bear in mind which group legs are required for a consensus government there and bear witness to ground zero of where Shia Sunni and Copt meet etc. and yes, when you see Lebanese in Israel it is due to them having to flee during the war as they had sided against Hezbollah. The Middle East is a complicated place but the complications are largely the result of trying winner take all policies on all sides,not to mention a fair dose of”enemy of my enemy is my frenemy” compounded with colonialism in onion layers and a distinct lack of shanti shanti all around.

Same things we get in Sahel:

- A foothold in the region.

- Access to negligible amounts of natural resources.

- A shit-ton of bad press and diplomatic conundrums.

- Needing to constantly fight islamist insurgents to stay in place.

- Not having to deal with a refugee crisis ten years down the line.

Macron has visited a few times, but considering he recently announced France would withdraw from Mali, I doubt he'll move towards any kind of re-establishment of the Lebanese protectorate any time soon.

The christian-aligned population is lukewarm to the idea at best, and the muslim-aligned population will fight it to the death, so it would have to be an active invasion. It's not a realistic prospect by any consideration.

You can find 50K idiots in every country.

Vatican City - 801. Nauru – 10,824. Tuvalu - 11,792. Palau - 18,094. San Marino - 33,931. Liechtenstein - 38,128. Monaco – 39,242.

Edit: population of Vatican city might be the wrong measure, I'm actually not sure how many can stand in Piazza San Pietro

What’s the point of this posting this pedantry? Please don’t.

Generally I agree, but this time I took this more as an interesting thought.

Well, consider the tourists present in most of these places, often many times over the local population.

Fun facts, Lebanon is a buffer state between Israel and the Arab worlds created by the western colonial powers [1].

For those who are in the IT backgrounds, it is a physical DMZ where virtual DMZ was originally modeled from. In principles, you'd probably do not want put any valuables in the the DMZ area.

The fact that any of the buffer countries work at all is a miracle, but it is not by design.

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffer_state

You link says Lebanon is a buffer state between Syria and Israel, but Syria and Israel share a border?

Lebanon as a buffer state is well documented by historians, please check them.

How can it be a buffer state if it doesn’t actually “buffer” two countries?

I mean Syria and Israel have been fighting at their shared border for decades.

It doesn't need to cover the entire border, the less area are exposed are better for your country's defense, this is security 101. Case in point, Belgium is widely considered as a buffer state between France and Germany because they have been fighting since forever, and it does not cover their entire border length.

From my understanding it's mainly because the shared border between Israel and Syria is mostly rugged terrain - easy to defend but hard to attack - known as the Golan Heights. For any land invasion on either side it's a lot easier to go through Lebanon.

Fun fact lold a lot. Are you seriously writing this in the context of the article?

Yes, I'm serious because a fail state can be of many bad reasons. One of the bad reasons can be it's created by colonial outsiders that don't really understand the geopolitical nature of the areas or do not have the best interests of the native people that are living in the artificially divided countries after the maps were drawn.

Here is one of the articles on Churchill's involvement in shaping up the the Middle East maps, "How Churchill helped to shape the Middle East we know today" [1].

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/apr/22/winston-chur...

Incorrect fact. The modern border of Lebanon was drawn in 1920, nearly three decades before the creation of Israel. Further the Levant has been a distinctive cultural and political entity going back to the middles ages.

The idea of the modern Israel as a state was well conceived before 1920, do you really think Israel was created out of sudden?

Levant included the original Palestine, Syria, Lebanon and surrounding areas not only Lebanon[1].

[1]https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Levant

> Lebanon is a buffer state between Israel and the Arab worlds

Well Lebanon IS Arab, so no to that.

Of course they put the Arabs in the buffer state that's the idea, do you think they will put Jews in there?

Another fun fact for you, Arab citizens of Israel population are mostly living in not so prime areas near to the borders with higher risk of excursion from the Palestinians or neighboring countries [1].

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_citizens_of_Israel

Who is "they" again?

The colonial powers supporting the creation of the modern Israel state, who else? Please check the link in my other comment on the article about the direct involvements of Churchill by a reputable UK based newspaper.

> Please check the link in my other

naaa...

Are you noting in agreement, disagreement or singing Hey Jude song?

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