By Elvira Abi Zeid | Junior News Editor
Lebanon, once hailed as the Paris of the Middle East, has been in a state of economic collapse since 2019, with the situation worsening by the day. As of February 2023, the Lebanese Lira has hit a new all-time low, sometimes trading at over 80,000 L.L to the dollar in the black market. This has caused an astounding ripple effect across the country, leaving many Lebanese citizens in abject poverty and struggling to make ends meet. The dire situation has been further exacerbated by the malice combination of the government’s inability and unwillingness to act and protect its citizens and the consumers of the Lebanese markets.
One of the most striking examples of the devastation of the economic collapse can be seen in the rising cost of basic food items. Most recently, the drastic increase in the price of onions, a staple ingredient in the Lebanese cuisine, has become virtually unaffordable for the majority of the intentionally and systematically impoverished population. With the price of onions skyrocketing from approximately 25,000 L.L to reach 80,000 L.L with the dollar. This has resulted in many Lebanese families having to forgo, as they did previously with meat demanding dishes, the traditional making of the majority of staple Lebanese culinary dishes.
For forsaking meat and forcefully following a meatless diet wasn’t enough degradation, even simple and modest courses demanding onions, a cultural simile for an item being cheap, has been rendered a luxury of many sorts. Moreover, the fact that this development comes to coincide with Lent, the observed fasting period for many Christians worldwide and most Lebanese Christians, which particularly includes at its core the practice of forgoing meat and turning to plant-based meals comes as a repulsively astonishing revelation. This may just turn out to be the sectarian authorities’ kind heartedness and keen determination to preserving their version of public morality by helping promote the virtues and values of Lent onto their Christian electorate by forcingly bestowing upon them the harshest of Lents. If that be it, and by virtue of its very sectarian bone marrow, the next crisis to hit the Lebanese cuisine would be the government’s extension of the very same melancholic privilege to the Muslim electorate of Lebanon for the upcoming Ramadan, the Islamic fasting period that is expected to start during March 2023.
The government’s ever-so-shocking inaction and failure to address the crisis have only made matters worse. The Central Bank’s Governor, a longstanding ally and the living breathing basket in which the political establishment have betted and put all their eggs in, has been accused of money laundering and embezzlement. All the while, the government has yet to implement any meaningful economic and financial reforms to halt the downfall of the country and its nation. The lack of decisive action has left the Lebanese people abandoned and helpless in the face of a brutal mangling of cartels and mafias whose grip on the Lebanese market and its devices are ever the more clear.
It is not just the rising cost of food that is causing distress in Lebanon. The economic collapse has also had a knock-on effect on the healthcare system, with medical supplies and equipment becoming scarce and unaffordable. The education system is also suffering, with many schools closing due to lack of funding and support.
The current situation in Lebanon is not just an economic crisis, it is a humanitarian and judicial crisis leading toward a crisis of the absence of the rule of law and accountability. The government’s inaction is tantamount to willing neglect, and it is the people of Lebanon who are paying the price. They paid the price with their lifelong savings, the standards of a prosperous economic lifestyle and habits they have been accustomed to since the late 90s, and the most melancholic of all prices is that of their basic ability to survive in their country and the forsaking of any semblance of normalcy they have so dearly come to know, love, and identify with as a nation, one of the very few common denominators that unite the Lebanese people uncontestedly.
The economic collapse in Lebanon has reached new levels of malice. The rising cost of basic amenities is actively devastating the very fabric of Lebanese society. The elongation and extenuation of the ramification enumerating from the multifold crisis that struck Lebanon since 2019 are only being propagated by the very same malice of a government’s intent and policy to have no policy. It is the very same tactic of absolute dismissal and “no action, no policy” that has led to the capital Beirut’s explosion and the murder of its inhabitants. On August 4th, 2020, a crime and calamity that could have been so easily prevented had the elected done their job destroyed the very heart of the nation, and now, we are witnessing the very same establishment so vigorously and bluntly destroying the Lebanese nation one city at a time, and one dish at a time.