It was dawning on Vavilov that he had arrived in Lebanon in the absolute worst of times. Over the previous two decades, these lands had suffered from wars, locust plagues, economic disruptions, and out-migrations that had reduced the pre-1900 population by more than 60 percent. But the worst problem facing the Arabian farmers and herders whom Vavilov visited stemmed from their country’s forfeiture of food security over the previous half century.
Beginning in the 1860s, when Napoleon III had landed six thousand troops on the Lebanese coast to intervene in internecine disputes on the side of Christians, the French had encouraged Lebanon’s Maronite Christians of the highlands and valleys to abandon their subsistence crops in favor of growing mulberry trees for silk production. Spurred on by their own merchant class, the small shareholders in the Mount Lebanon highlands and the Bekaa Valley had planted nearly half of all their arable lands in mulberry trees, forsaking the wheat grains that had offered them bulgur for tabbouleh and the chickpeas from which they had made hummus over countless centuries. [1]
As the number of silk mills in the region increased up through 1885, Lebanon began to gain half of its gross national product from the silk trade and was therefore able to purchase two-thirds of the bulgur, flour, dried legumes, and dairy products its peasants consumed from Syria, Turkey, and even North African countries. As Lebanese agricultural scientist Rami Zurayk has deftly summarized: “All this required the planting of large areas of mulberry trees, thereby displacing the traditional food farming systems, with the result that wheat and other foods had to be imported and were sold to the very farmers who had once grown them as staples.”
With both the Ottoman War and World War I taking their tolls in the decade prior to Vavilov’s visit, however, the silk-for-food trade network came unraveled. The resulting tragedy of food insecurity is the reason that some fifteen million people of Lebanese descent now live beyond Lebanon’s borders, and only five million Lebanese remain in their native land. [2]
In November of 1914, the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of Germany, disrupting the trade of silk to France and leading the Ottomans to mandate that every Lebanese farmer who could carry a gun join the army. Hundreds of thousands of Lebanese men and boys were forced to leave the mulberry groves and remnant grain fields, though roughly a fifth of them deserted their compulsory military service and fled the country. The shortage of silk leaf harvesters alone would have thrown the country into an economic crisis, but blockades also prevented the women who worked in the silk factories from getting their products to high-end French markets, and the silk trade collapsed. [3] With a locust plague devastating the remaining cereal fields in the summer of 1915 and no money to purchase staple foods from Syria or Africa, the food security of the Lebanese peasantry evaporated before their eyes. They were left with only locust-damaged mulberry leaves, which silkworms can eat but humans cannot. The mulberries themselves had little market, and their food value did not sustain many families.
Extracted from Where our Food Comes From by Gary Paul Nabhan
and used with permission.
- I don’t know how much of this story is recounted at the Bsous Museum, an attraction little-known outside Lebanon. [↩]
- It should be noted that Nabhan himself is the descendant of Lebanese emigrants. [↩]
- Photograph from Shemali. [↩]
