The Forestation Days

Bejjeh was the venue

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Dr. Michel E. Abs

Secretary General of the Middle East Council of Churches

We came to this peaceful Lebanese village perched on the hills of the Byblos region, where the first boats known in history sailed across the sea carrying the cypher to the world.

We got there on Sunday the twenty-sixth of December thanks to the joint initiative of the Theological and Ecumenical Relations Department and the Environmental Justice Committee of the Middle East Council of Churches in coordination with the village parish and its cultural and sports club.

Hundreds of seedlings were distributed to the village youth who were waiting for the appointed zero hour in order to plant them in different parts of the region. The various segments of the Bejjeh community had been mobilized for the success of this event, which will be a milestone in the history of the MECC's work in the field of agricultural-rural development, a field in which it has always been a pioneer.

A prayer service took place first in the village church, led by the director of the Theological and Ecumenical Relations Department in the MECC. The service was followed by the interventions of the MECC General Secretary, the Director General of the Ministry of Agriculture and the head of the Bejjeh Club, after which everyone planted trees in the church outskirts of the church building, symbolizing the resilience of plants and greenery in the face of neglect, desertification and migration.

It is well known that the Bekaa region had been nicknamed in history as “The Barns of Rome” as agriculture had historically been the backbone of the Lebanese and Levantine economy. The Lebanese and Levantines have lived on agriculture for hundreds of years and this for very many past generations as testified by a plethora of popular proverbs that exist in Lebanon as well as in the Bilad Al Châm.

However, the fact that the whole Levantine region had been thrust into the furnace of the industrial revolution before it had become prepared for it put it in a subordinate state to what was happening in the industrialized world, so much so that it gradually lost its renowned agricultural identity. This was particularly true of Lebanon to such an extent that its income from agriculture became a meager percentage of its national income. All this was aggravated by the absence of an effective agricultural development policy at the level of the Lebanese state, as well as in the absence of any effort to get agriculture out of the quagmire that successive government policies have plunged it into.

Lebanon witnessed an agricultural renaissance at the beginning of the seventies in the last century. However, the war led to the decline of this renaissance, as many fertile agricultural areas became the scene of military operations thus allowing warring gangs to loot well-equipped agricultural investments.

Moreover, it is worth noting that the alleged successive economic development plans for decades after the establishment of the Lebanese state did not contain any comprehensive agricultural master plan for the country, notwithstanding anything mentioned in relation to agriculture, a fact that eliminated this sector altogether. This intentional neglect of agriculture had been matched by a massive support for the service and rentier sectors at the expense of the productive sectors, which would have provided an added value to the Lebanese economy.

The absence of agricultural credit banks and the low ratio of agricultural loans to service and rent loans is scandalous, as indicated by existing banking statistics as well as by the data provided by the Chamber of Commerce and Industry.

In the face of all this, the Middle East Council of Churches, being concerned with development, with promoting social justice as well as with combating migration, finds itself in direct confrontation with the widespread tendency in the public and private sectors that neglect agriculture to the point of eliminating it.

It is not a coincidence that the first director of the Relief, Rehabilitation and Reconstruction Program in the MECC was an agricultural engineer, and that the Council was one of the first institutions that supported agricultural development throughout the eighties of the last century. Agricultural programs took a large part of our work at the time, and we employed five agricultural engineers in various regions of Lebanon in order to identify the needs of farmers and coordinate support projects for them. Such rural development programs greatly affected rural communities we worked in.

Today, as stated in the strategic framework approved by the MECC Executive Committee, which we presented to our international partners, we are preparing to launch a new era of church based agricultural work in various regions of the Middle East, pending however on the availability of local leaders and on civil response.

In this context, we link in our forecasted framework in agricultural development and environmental protection, on the one hand, and in rural development, on the other. Therefore, the departments concerned are the Agricultural Projects Department and the Environmental Justice Committee, in full coordination with the Department of Theological and Ecumenical Relations, since we are dealing with creation, the Creator's gift to the creature.

The day of Bejjeh, next day after Christmas, is a pilot day for us in launching the "Days of Forestation" campaign, which we begun in the Byblos region in Mount Lebanon, a campaign that is required to permeate the entire Levant, all the way to the Nile Valley.

This "Bejjeh Day", allowed us through hands-on practice to develop a model day and an exemplar in terms of protecting the environment, of widespreading greenery and, most importantly, mobilizing local communities in a collective framework aimed at long-term as well as at far reaching results.

In the midst of this blessed campaign that succeeded in bringing several local groups to work together in unison, we cannot overlook the endowments of churches as well as the endowments of non-Christian communities and their importance in pushing the agricultural renaissance forward and strengthening participation in a common life through participation in collective work and production.

Agricultural renaissance is one of the foundations for protecting homelands, as it is the best means for food security and for reaching self-sufficiency.

As we prepare in the MECC to launch our first agricultural-environmental work plan, we keep all these given facts and goals in mind, hoping to obtain sufficient financial and technical support for the success of this project.