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In the Lebanese village of Yammouneh, the cannabis cultivation and hashish trade suffered a major setback due to the economic crisis that hit the country.
For the first time in almost 20 years, the village “mukhtar”, Jamal al-Sharif, was forced to stop growing hemp and turn to apple farming.
The New York Times said in a report on the village, located at the base of a mountain in the Bekaa Valley, that Lebanese farmers have been badly affected by the fall in the local currency, which has lost about 80 percent. of its value against the dollar since last fall.
The bill for the imported fuel and fertilizer needed to grow hemp, which according to one landowner, has become “devouring the profits”, while the value of the local currency money that farmers make from selling hashish has decreased.
Faced with this situation, there has been a decline in the cultivation of hemp and the production of hashish (from which it is extracted) in Yammouneh and Lebanon in general, which is the third largest supplier of hashish in the world, after Morocco and Afghanistan, according to United Nations.
While the financial crisis in Lebanon cast a negative shadow on Lebanon’s domestic market, the civil war in Syria complicated smuggling routes, making it difficult for intermediaries to access foreign markets.
This is reflected in the quaint little town nestled in an abandoned pocket of Lebanon, which pulled the hashish trade out of the clutches of poverty and provided its people for years more income than any legal crop, allowing them to build houses, buy equipment and spending on their children’s education.
One of the village landlords told the newspaper: “If it weren’t for the hash (trade) here, I wouldn’t have seen a single house in the village.”
The report notes that the numerous two- and three-story villas and expensive SUVs in the village attest to what its residents earned from the hashish trade.
However, due to the current crisis, which has caused a sharp drop in cannabis prices, “it is not worth producing”.
The village mayor told the newspaper that many farmers have stopped growing hemp and that growing it has become a “hobby.”
The report says that the economic crisis in Lebanon is “threatening” at the moment so there have been years of government raids and efforts to combat drugs.
It should be noted that, last February, the Lebanese government issued a law legalizing the cultivation of cannabis for medical purposes, but it has not yet been implemented, which means that growing this crop in Yammouna is illegal.
The newspaper drew attention to the nearly 1,200 Syrian refugees in the village, who were driven by circumstances in search of work and escaped from the hell of civil war to work in cannabis cultivation.
Talal Al-Sharif, head of the village council, told the newspaper that farmers ask him: “Why should I grow hemp if I am going to lose? So they smoke it themselves to forget their worries.”
