No respite for Lebanon

  Around 2 million people in Lebanon, including 1.29 million Lebanese residents and 700,000 Syrian refugees, are currently facing food insecurity. The situation is expected to worsen in the coming months.

An analysis predicts that the situation will deteriorate between January and April of 2023, with 2.26 million people - 1.46 million Lebanese residents and around 800,000 refugees - expected to be in the "crisis" phase or worse and requiring urgent assistance.

“More people than ever before in Lebanon are now dependent on assistance,” says Abdallah Alwardat, WFP Representative and Country Director in Lebanon.

Beirut has turned into a city of contrasts. Expensive cars park before popular restaurants and bars, while people of all ages rummage through bins for something edible. For those, who work for international companies or have other means of accessing dollars, life has become relatively cheap, which also explains the thriving cocktail bars and fully booked restaurants.

"The taxation system in Lebanon is highly regressive, which means that there is no wealth tax code, and corporate taxes are amongst the lowest in the world compared to all OECD averages," Hussein Cheaito, a development economist at The Policy Initiative, told DW. The beneficiaries of the taxation system are those of the "political class and their business connections, because this 1% owns more than 70% of the national income".

 A report on food insecurity in the Middle East by the independent research network Arab Barometer found that nearly half of all citizens in Lebanon stated that they ran out of food before they had money to buy more.

Lebanon ranks "among the most severe crises globally since the mid-19th century," according to the World Bank.

In a recent report on rising hunger and poverty in Lebanonby Human Rights Watch (HRW), Lena Simet stated that "millions of people in Lebanon have been pushed into poverty and have cut back on food." 

"A person that is earning 1,500,000 Lebanese pounds used to have an equivalent of $1,000 before the crisis, and now it is equivalent to less than $200," Hussein Cheaito explained.

For the past 20 years, Lebanese banks have kept the pegged exchange rate of $1 to 1,500 Lebanese pounds. This, however, will be updated to $1 to 15,000 pounds on February 1. Even though this is 10 times more than before, it is still far from the actually used exchange rate on the black market. The current rate ist 50,000 pounds to the dollar. 

Lebanon's middle class vanishes as economy collapses – DW – 01/19/2023