Lebanon's potato farmers prepare for hard season

Potato planting season is in full swing in the Bekaa farmlands and Elie Samaha must rush off to his tractor where two women are seated on a low-hanging platform, waiting for the machine to grind into action so they can toss seeds into its path.

Samaha is a farmer in his 20s.

He is clad in denim trousers and a lumberjack shirt, which makes for an idiosyncratic contrast to the checkered Arab scarf that he has wrapped around his head.

“We started planting the potato seeds yesterday, which is a bit later than usual because we had to wait for the storms to end,” said Samaha, referring to torrential rains that gripped the country last week.

He will spend eight days planting seeds in this way across his 40 dunam potato farmland, with a workforce of three men and six women.

Samaha is eager to work, but harbors fears that hang like smog over an otherwise sunny patch of tilled soil.

Last year, Samaha’s potato yields fell by more than 30 percent from the year before, leading the young farmer to bear some losses. The cause of this was higher-than-average temperatures in the summer and an unseasonably dry autumn which, experts say, was brought on by global warming.

If the experts are right, then Lebanon will see an even warmer summer and autumn this year and the potato harvest will worsen.

“There’s never any security in farming,” said Bassam Kamar of Kattan Freezers, a company that stores farm products and owns large tracts of farmland. Kamar reports that half of his produce became spoiled by hot weather last year.

The low potato yields spell problems not only for farmers, but for a whole economy where potatoes are one of its most important crops, with around 250,000 tons of the vegetable being exported every year. During the summer season, Lebanon is one of only two exporters of potatoes in the Arab region.