How Lebanese people survive the ‘normalization of misery’

Zuhair looks despondently down at his feet, where the shoemaker’s profound poverty is obvious in his own shoes, tattered beyond repair, which he wears without socks.

“I can’t even afford to buy shoes,” he says. “We are barely surviving. We don’t see a chicken; meat is off the menu.”

Zuhair, who has big hands, a mishmash of teeth, and thick veins protruding from overly thin arms, refuses to be photographed or to give his full name. He expresses shame at how dramatically his life has been degraded by the economic collapse that began in October 2019, in Lebanon – a nation once trumpeted as the Switzerland of the Middle East.

Lebanon’s economic meltdown, brought on when the government defaulted on its foreign debt and the currency collapsed, triggered months of protests demanding deep political reforms and accountability from corrupt sectarian elites. Dubbed a “revolution” by the thousands of those who took to the streets, it resulted in little positive change.

The financial crisis was deemed so severe that the World Bank, in spring 2021, said Lebanon could be among the top three “most severe crisis episodes globally” since the mid-19th century.

The Lebanese people have been the subject of dire predictions of malnourished destitution. The impact of their country’s economic collapse has been compounded by a perfect storm of the pandemic, the massive 2020 ammonium nitrate explosion in the Port of Beirut that caused billions in damage, chronic political deadlock, and a ruling elite that analysts say has settled into a strategy of “doing nothing.”

“I can’t take it anymore. Every time I feel depressed and sick to my head, I go sit on the beach,” says Zuhair of the impact of his weekly earnings dropping from $300 to $50. He works in a small factory that produces 32 pairs of women’s shoes a day.

“Things got worse after the revolution because the people who run the country are a bunch of thieves,” he says. Before the crash, he and his family “had it all, used to go on picnics,” and could pay for meat, food, and their own rent.

Now his two teenage children can’t go to school because he can’t pay their annual fees of several hundred dollars.

“This country is gone,” says Zuhair. “It’s a misery.”

Daily challenge of survival

So how do Lebanese get by every day, in a system so broken that citizens hold up banks to retrieve their own cash; where the lack of fuel limits the police response to crimes; and where, in the southern city of Sidon, local officials have asked for firefighting help from a Palestinian refugee camp?

For Zuhair and his family – among the more than half of Lebanese people who have fallen under the poverty line for the first time in their lives – survival today means living in a house on loan from a friend. Without running water, it was only recently hooked up with enough electricity to power a lamp donated by neighbors.

Incongruously amid the poverty, the Port of Beirut is clogged with new cars, and streets in more affluent neighborhoods are plied by the latest-model Porsche, Lamborghini, and Ferrari sports cars.

“In Lebanon, we are seeing two split economies: We are seeing the wealthy are not losing significant amounts of money, and in fact are probably getting richer,” says David Wood, senior Lebanon analyst for the International Crisis Group in Beirut.

He notes suggestions of “renewed prosperity” on the back of data that the value of Lebanon’s imports has reached pre-October 2019 levels, though more reportedly is spent on importing cars than medicine.

“It’s damning,” says Mr. Wood. “We’re seeing that people who do have disposable cash are spending it on cars and watches and assets ... while for the majority of people in Lebanon, we are seeing the normalization of misery.”

Elites’ hold on power

Change appeared possible after 2019, but assumptions on the street proved not to be true, says Mr. Wood, that either the economic collapse would jolt the ruling elites into action, or that inaction by those elites would lead to massive civil unrest.

“The calculation has been made,” says Mr. Wood. “Lebanon’s elites have decided that any reforms they need to accept, that would impact their grip on power, are unacceptable, and that it actually serves their narrow self-interest to do nothing, rather than to risk losing control over a system which has served them so well for so long.”

Despite the lack of reform and grim economic statistics for ordinary Lebanese, the crisis has significantly expanded one area of government that appears to be working: two programs that provide cash assistance, administered via two social welfare programs.

The United Nations World Food Program (WFP) estimates that it supports one-third of all the people in the country, working largely through those government structures. Despite that support, a recent U.N. food security review found that a quarter of all those living in Lebanon, some 1.4 million people, are “food insecure.”

“That means they are in crisis mode, or in emergency mode,” says Antoine Renard, the deputy country director for the WFP in Lebanon. He says 112,000 people qualify as being under emergency status. “The challenge you have with this crisis is that what used to be the middle class has been wiped away, and then you have those who were poor, even before.”

What started as an emergency WFP response to the Syrian refugee crisis – Lebanon hosts the largest number of refugees per capita in the world – has expanded exponentially in recent years to provide sustainable support to cushion the blow of the multiple crises for Lebanese people, also.

Needs surged after the 2020 port blast, which caused damages estimated at $15 billion and left some 300,000 people homeless, prompting the WFP to provide direct and immediate aid through food parcels. It also facilitated a system of cash payments via a late 2021 World Bank loan called the Emergency Social Safety Net, which monthly provides $20 per individual to families in need, topped up by $25 per family.

Together, the WFP estimates that those Lebanese support programs have scaled up 35-fold since their inception. Cash is now provided to 700,000 people and food to 300,000.

“This is a protracted crisis,” says Mr. Renard. “Now we talk more and more with key ministries [and] with many other crises around the world; we have to speak about an exit strategy,” as the WFP shifts focus to more sustainable support of Lebanon’s food and social protection systems.

How far does the cash go?

Mounir Kahil and his family, who live by candlelight in a hovel in Beirut’s southern suburbs, are among those benefiting from the cash handouts. The former bus driver – who lost his job when the private school he drove for closed due to the 2019 economic crash – pulls a card from his wallet that he uses to withdraw $105 per month from the WFP-World Bank program.

It is not enough to cover all their needs, including $250 in monthly rent, for which Mr. Kahil says he has sold pieces of furniture and even downsized the family stove.

But the cash helps, along with a similar card issued by Hezbollah, the Iran-backed Shiite militia, which enables big discounts for poor people in areas it controls at specific Hezbollah shops and pharmacies. Mr. Kahil’s wife also earns $7 each day during the school year, as a school cleaner.

“Everybody in this area has to fight for their family, for food,” says Mr. Kahil, who uses a sawed-off broom handle as a cane. “Ten years ago, we never thought it would be this way. Now we can’t even buy a Pepsi.”

Also helping Lebanese people get by are remittances from relatives abroad, which have recently grown to 53.8% of the country’s gross domestic product – the highest remittance dependency in the world.

“Remittances are definitely a big part of the answer to how Lebanese survive each day,” says Jacob Boswall, the team leader of Mercy Corps Lebanon Crisis Analytics in Beirut.

Remittances have for decades played an important role in the Lebanese economy, but prior to the 2019 crisis they were traditionally used to invest in productive assets, which helped boost the economy.

“What’s happening now is usage is almost exclusively being put toward survival, and that’s buying basic items like food, fuel, and paying rent,” says Mr. Boswall. That significant change is “deeply, deeply unequal” and polarizing, with very little sharing or distribution of remittances.

Not receiving remittances, and unaware of any cash or food handout scheme, shoemaker Zuhair describes a lack of support – and 90-minute walks to the nearest beach, where he can use his fishing rod.

Gone are the days when he could pay for a bus to Jounieh, the town just north of Beirut, where he used to fish on weekends. Or even pay for a ride to the nearby beach from his home in Beirut’s southern suburb of Dahiya.

“I don’t get paid much to begin with,” says Zuhair. “We have no other choice but to work. If we stop work, we literally don’t eat.”