Cannabis farmers’ hopes dashed: 2025 season harvest to be confiscated and destroyed

The government's decision to destroy the 2025 cannabis harvest has created a significant rift with farmers in the Bekaa and the North, who feel betrayed by the Cannabis Regulatory Authority. The government has decided to prohibit the sale of the 2025 season's harvest, ordering its complete confiscation and destruction under an official plan. This comes despite promises made to the farmers by the Regulatory Authority.

The Authority, led by its president, had toured farms and met with growers before the harvest. It listened to their demands and concerns, and they reached a shared vision for the sector's future through legalization and regulation, benefiting both the state and the farmer. The Authority's head, Dani Fadel, went further. He assured farmers that this year's harvest would be sold, framing it as a crucial first step to build trust and encourage their participation under the new cannabis regulation law. The plan was for the crop to be laboratory tested, with any portion meeting international standards approved for sale.

The farmers co-operated with Mr Fadel, who, in a previous special interview with "Al-Modon", promised doubled profits for both growers and the state. Furthermore, Mr Fadel promised farmers the launch of an electronic platform. They would use this platform to register and declare their lands, cultivation, and, consequently, their harvests, as a preparatory step toward legalizing the cannabis promotion and sales process.

Those promises, however, masked disagreements within the Cannabis Regulatory Authority itself. Members were split into two camps. The first view, held by four members including the president, advocated for a pragmatic, temporary arrangement. This would allow the 2025 cannabis crop to be sold under state supervision, thereby avoiding economic and security losses and preparing the ground for implementing Law 178/2020, rather than destroying the crops and wasting the agricultural effort.

The second view, supported by three members, held that the 2025 season's crop is ill...
Post Author: /u/matinxxx243453
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Is South Beirut safe for foreigners ? (2025)

Hi everybody,

I'm a French independent reporter and will be visiting Beirut as part of a larger trip to Syria, in December. I wanted to travel to the southern suburbs of Beirut (Dahieh), to gather images of the damage caused by Israeli bombings, and images of the mausoleum of Hassan Nasrallah. Would you advise against going there or is it generally considered safe ? (My government along with other European governments advise against all travel to South Beirut because of Hezbollah activity)

Thank you so much,

I look forward to visiting your country!
Post Author: /u/Winter-Leadership986
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Lebanon's historic pines are dying, one cone at a time | REUTERS

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Lebanon's historic pines are dying, one cone at a time | REUTERS

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Nov 11
2025

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Farmers in Bkassine, Lebanon, struggle as an invasive insect damages pine cones, risking livelihoods dependent on the Middle East's largest pine forest.

News #Reuters #Newsfeed #lebanon #pinecones #environment

Lebanon's historic pines are dying, one cone at a time

By Raghed Waked
November 11, 20253:55 AM MSTUpdated November 11, 2025

Summary
- Insects threaten Lebanon's prized pine nuts

• Forest and livelihoods at risk, prices rising

• Trees left vulnerable by ravages of climate change

BKASSINE FOREST, Lebanon, Nov 11 (Reuters) - In the heart of southern Lebanon, where pine trees once stood tall and abundant, a quiet crisis is unfolding. The cones are barren, the trees are drying and a forest that was a lifeline for entire communities is under siege.

Farmers in Bkassine forest have watched their pine yields dwindle for years. At first, they blamed seasonal weather changes. Then, in 2015, scientists confirmed what many feared: an invasive insect had taken hold, one that feeds on the cones that produce Lebanon's prized pine nuts.

"It's not just the nuts," said Dr. Nabil Nemer, a forest health expert at the Holy Spirit University of Kaslik (USEK). "This insect attacks the cones over three years. It doesn't just reduce productivity, it wipes it out."

In some cases, up to 82% of a cone's seed pods are left as empty shells, according to Nemer. Trees weakened by the ravages of climate change are particularly vulnerable.

The insect, Leptoglossus occidentalis, is originally from North America and likely arrived in Lebanon via untreated wooden shipping pallets.

It has since spread across the Mediterranean to Turkey and other areas, according to his research.
Livelihoods are under threat in the Bkassine reserve, the Middle East's largest productive pine forest. The trees grow in other parts of Lebanon, but largely not commercially.

For decades, Miled Hareb's fa...
Post Author: /u/EreshkigalKish2
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Architectural Optimism Is Alive & Well in Lebanon. We Design Beirut showed off the country’s glamour & grit in the face of drones & air strikes

Architectural Optimism Is Alive and Well in Lebanon
We Design Beirut showed off the country’s glamour and grit in the face of drones and air strikes.

Text by
Jack Balderrama Morley
Published by
Dwell

This story is part of Fair Take, our reporting on global design events that looks up close at the newest ideas in fixtures, furnishings, and more.
I did not want to go to Beirut. I was tired from working on a book all summer, and I wanted to stay home and rest, not fly halfway around the world to go to a weeklong design fair that was putting me up in the Lebanese capital. Design press junkets can be the kind of thing where some PR person whisks you off to a very expensive building, and then you look at the building and nod and say, yes, this is a very nice building, and then they serve you a very expensive lunch, and you nod and say, yes, this, too, is very nice, and then you go home having learned what, exactly, you don’t know.

For a moment, I considered backing out of the trip, blaming it on the State Department’s Level Four travel warning: "Do NOT Travel to Lebanon due to crime, terrorism, civil unrest, kidnapping, unexploded landmines, and the risk of armed conflict." Yes, sir! The news stories we see in the West about the country depict it almost exclusively as a place of explosions and war. That could be enough to stop many from going. But, thankfully, I try not to let the U.S. government direct my decisions, and the design fair, called We Design Beirut, was not only unlike any junket I’ve been on, it showed me how deeply American media and institutions have failed to understand the region and its design intelligence, to our loss.

One of the clichés about Lebanon is that it’s a land of contrasts—you can ski in the morning and lounge on a beach in the afternoon; you can be shopping at Hermès when the city’s power flickers out, as it often does—and this actually rang true on the trip. The fair’s organizers shuttled press and VIPs around a packed schedule of events, and the tonal contrasts among the de...
Post Author: /u/EreshkigalKish2
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IAF: To celebrate the 80th anniversary of Middle East Airlines, we decided to impose a strict no fly zone over lebanese airspace. Happy anniversary!

Mods please dont remove
Post Author: /u/fib1324
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MOT Charles Hage: Lebanon Launches Largest Fiber Rollout: 325,000+ Homes to Gain FTTH Access Across 25 Cities

Post Author: /u/Adventurous_Sea_6269
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MOT Charles Hage: Lebanon Launches Largest Fiber Rollout: 325,000+ Homes to Gain FTTH Access Across 25 Cities

Post Author: /u/Adventurous_Sea_6269
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Lebanon's farmers fight to survive amid Israel's lingering war

Lebanon's farmers fight to survive amid Israel's lingering war

MENA

5 min read
Sarah Khalil

10 November, 2025

Nearly a year after the ceasefire, Israel's continued attacks and occupation have left Lebanon's farmers displaced and their fields destroyed.

Israel's war and continued attacks have devastated farming in southern Lebanon [Getty]
Nearly a year after the November 2024 ceasefire was meant to halt Israel's war in Lebanon, farmers across the south of the country and the eastern Bekaa Valley are still trying to live amid destruction and ruin.

Farmland lies abandoned, livestock have perished, and families who once lived off their crops are now surviving on aid.

What should have marked the start of recovery instead exposes the long reach of Israel's devastation and its lasting grip on Lebanon's agricultural heartlands.

A new joint report by Action Against Hunger, Oxfam, and Insecurity Insight, titled "We Lost Everything: The Impact of Conflict on Farmers and Food Security in Lebanon", documents the severe economic and humanitarian consequences of Israel's continuing violations of the ceasefire agreement.

The findings build on the agencies' earlier report, entitled "When Bombs Turn the Taps Off", which detailed Israel's destruction of Lebanon's water infrastructure, leaving more than 150,000 people without clean water months after the ceasefire.

A system in collapse

The latest report found that almost 90 percent of farmers surveyed have seen their food production plummet since October 2023, when the conflict between Hezbollah and Israel started.

For many people in Khiam, Bodai, Saaideh, Baalbek, and Aitaroun, agriculture has stopped completely, cutting off entire communities from their main source of income.

"Some farmers have lost everything, and this will have devastating repercussions not just for them and their families, but the communities they help to feed," Christina Wille, director and a founding member of Insecurity Insight, told The New Arab.

"The majority of interviewed farmers told u...
Post Author: /u/EreshkigalKish2
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Hicham Bou Nassif: Hezbollah's Three Mechanisms of Ruin

Hezbollah has committed a long series of crimes against the Lebanese, but the most dangerous is dragging them into confrontations like the one that has raged for two years, regardless of whether they consent to the fight. The state of our exhausted country is catastrophic, and the horizon remains blocked. Who gave Hezbollah the mandate to drag us here?

By what right did Hassan Nasrallah launch his "war of support" that embroiled all of Lebanon, given that he has only ever been the leader of one of its factions? And in whose name does Naim Qassem follow his predecessor’s path, after all that has occurred?

These are obvious questions. Hezbollah, in my estimation, does not bother with them because the religious consciousness that drives it is unburdened by such concerns. Indeed, one cannot engage in any discussion with supporters of Hezbollah (or Hamas) on social media without the immediate argument that "divine laws" permit resistance, that Jews occupy Muslim lands, and that jihad is consequently a personal religious duty, and the like.

What about non-Muslims who do not think along these lines? What, too, of Muslims who understand Islam differently? What, finally, if both groups constitute the majority in Lebanon, and perhaps even in Palestine? The answer is always ready, repeated a thousand times: whoever dislikes what we are doing can leave.

The first mechanism is dispensing with the need for a popular mandate before embarking on adventures that embroil all of Lebanon, and not just its own rank and file. Its second mechanism is the use of incitement and the sowing of hatred in society to flatten public consciousness. Anyone following Hezbollah's mouthpieces recently will notice their rhetoric is mobilized more against domestic opponents, especially Christians, than against Israel. This is no coincidence. The bluster against Israel is now an empty threat. By extension, the more Shiite resentment is directed at the Christian community, the more the Shiite populace forgets to ask Hezbollah basic questions. ...
Post Author: /u/matinxxx243453
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What to do about sick stray cats if I’m only visiting

Hi, I’m only in Beirut for another week and everyone I’ve spoken to says the animal charities always have their hands full and no resources to help. Right now 2/3 kittens (pictured here) need eye drops and antibiotics. Another adult cat in the same area is probably almost blind and also only needs the same for one week.

I can take them to the vet but they ideally need to be indoors while taking this medicine. If not, someone needs to give it to them every day for a week. This is theoretically easy because they’re in the same place every day but the business owners who take care of them don’t have the time to give meds to them twice a day or only work one shift or care but just don’t know how to handle cats, which I understand.

So..does anyone know who I can reach out to? Because there is no point in me taking them to the vet if they can’t take their full course of antibiotics and eye drops.

sorry if this is in any way tone-deaf, I just work a lot with cats and don’t like to just walk away.
Post Author: /u/michaela_kohlhaas
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To the atheists of Lebanon, what made you wake up?

For me, there are so many strong arguments against the existence of a true God, from the everyday horrors of genocide, natural disasters, and disease, to the fact that humans have created countless religions over the millennia without ANY real evidence for any of them whatsoever. And on top of that, that religion consistently fuels hate, division, and bigotry, and I'd even argue it's the best source of those 3 traits. I can also can into the scientific aspect of it more, but I'm more curious about what made you wake up to this scam.
Post Author: /u/michaelis999
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Extremely disappointed with this government

Almost one whole year with this new government and yet we as a fucking nation have not made any and I mean any progress to fix this backward country. No disarmament of hizballah in fact now they are rearming, no investments from foreign countries to boost our economy, no banking sector, no water, no electricity, 80% of Lebanese live in poverty, no solution to the Syrian crisis, no disarmament to the Palestinian camps, robbery and murder at a all time high, and many more. We are a fucking joke of a country and an embarrassment to this world. We bitch and moan about change and yet we never do. We don’t even make it out of the first step of changing which is cutting corruption, or even the removal of militias. All I hear is promises of stuff we want to hear, and yet nothing happens. The thing is the government isn’t even the problem any more it’s us, we don’t wanna change, we just don’t, we don’t put enough pressure on these old fucking nut heads in the government to change, we are divided by everything in religion, in politics, in everything. We don’t work together, we work against each other. Shit man we bitch and moan about Syria and Syrians yet they are actually putting in effort to change, and we are here stuck in the stone ages. What Tom Barrak said yesterday wasn’t wrong at all, we are a failed state, we are a failed country, we are corrupted, and we are being taken advantage of by other countries, and are we going to change? By the looks of it no. Rome want built in a day, but it also wasn’t built in a 1000 years. Fuck man we are cooked.
Post Author: /u/OmarD1021
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Shark Tank Jury

Hey,

Who's your favorite shark?

Alain Bejjani (pic 1) – Former CEO of Majid Al Futtaim Holding.

Hassan Ezzelddine (pic 2) – Retail & distribution veteran in Lebanon (aka CEO spinneys)

Maroun Chammas (pic 3) – Serial investor in tech, energy, foods in Lebanon (Berytech, Medco)

Georges Karam (pic 4) – Lebanese expatriate with international telecom/investment

Christine Assouad (pic 5) – CEO in food & retail space in Lebanon (Dunkin)
Post Author: /u/jooneyJ
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Food Heroes detail | World Food Day | Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Anthony Rahayel

“We are inventing more, exporting more. We are doing things we’ve never done before.”

Lebanon

On a recent sunny Tuesday, some 1 900m up a mountain in Northern Lebanon, Anthony Rahayel wound his way up a narrow road in search of cheese.

His destination was Btelaya, one of the last remaining villages that produce Jebneh Darfiyyeh, and home to a family that’s been making it for 140 years.

“I spent 24 hours with the shepherd, watching how the cheese is made from start to end,” Anthony says excitedly. “I even went to the cave they put the cheese in. It’s a one-month process of aging it, drying it.”

It was the first time the whole process had been documented on camera, he says.

It’s these moments he lives for, showing the cultural and culinary beauty of Lebanon to people around the world, including his compatriots. He loves to show locals new things about their own country, he says, and for the diaspora worldwide to take pride and interest in their heritage.

“It is the best cuisine in the world – no competition,” says Anthony, who credits the diversity of influences left by the Romans, the Ottomans and the French, and Lebanon’s key position along the old Silk Road.

“Our country also has many days of good weather, so we have the greatest veggies. Everything you eat here is natural and tastes amazing.”

Since 2012, the dentist-turned-food-blogger has built a loyal following showing that richness on his Youtube channel and website No Garlic No Onions. He also produces short features on Lebanese TV.

He’s keen to dispel Lebanon’s old image of a country marked by conflict and economic crises, he says. Still, crisis also shapes food culture, and not always negatively. Separated by Civil war, communities fostered unique food habits that reflect the religious and cultural roots of those who settled there, explains Anthony, especially in the villages.

The recent economic crisis, meanwhile, has given an unexpected jolt to Lebanon’s food industry.

“We are inventing more, exporting...
Post Author: /u/EreshkigalKish2
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French is going strong among Lebanese

I was at the airport in Istanbul, and I noticed many of the lebanese where mixing french with the rest of our lebanese language -- especially parents with their kids. It's great to see we are preserving our culture, especially since our language is objectively considered to be one of the most beautiful ones (this I have been told by people from north africa and the gulf) out of the \~7000.

Don't let some leftist / pan-arabist from Syria, Palestine, USA convince you that we are "colonised". No 7abibi, a language is a language, regardless of it's origin, it's the heritage that our lebanese ancestors left us to preserve.
Post Author: /u/Used-Worker-1640
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Sabra and shatila

I am afew days late bs i didnt have enough karma bs baad yale aam ysir i finally understood enu lebanon fell the moment we accepted palestinians as fellow humans into our country.
Elna sentayn 7arb thousands meto w hundreds of thousands displaced just to support their war w2esa we see them drugging wkilling our kids and people IN OUR OWN COUNTRY, not to mention kam 7arb saro maa israel kmn kermelon.
Hobeika was a national hero🇱🇧🦅
Post Author: /u/Rayan-WZ
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Share your best scenic shot you took in Lebanon! And let us guess where the spot was

Post Author: /u/Critical_Soil_262
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ISP Bandwidth Throttling?

Anyone here on OGERO or IDM fiber experiencing bandwidth throttling at night?

Been noticing a significant drop from 350Mbps during the day to 25Mbps at night despite not being on an unlimited plan. I subscribe to the 1,000GB per month package without any of the unlimited night/weekend services to ensure I get what I pay for.

Things run perfectly well during the day, but drop once it gets to 6-7pm.
Post Author: /u/onceuponatime863
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The real reason why many lebanese have lost sympathy

The war of isnad happened for 11 months almost a year during that time lebanese people that didn't want war were called traitors and zionists disgusting words to tell your fellow Lebanese simply because they wanted to live in peace.

Nasrallah said he will continue the war as long as the war in gaza continues and he will not stop.

So it would be understandable that people that were shamed for 11 months and called all sorts of bad things by their fellow Lebanese that were so exited for war to not care as much especially if they tried so hars to warn if not even say I told you so in a salty way as things unfolded.

Also things like we want war and you don't have a say in it were said. If we don't have a say in it how can we be held responsible for the isnad choice that we weren't consulted by.
Post Author: /u/Aggressive_Mousse_55
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