Lebanon’s government holds no strategic stockpile of grains and Tuesday’s blast destroyed the privately held stocks at its only large grain silo, the economy minister, a U.N. official and a regional grain expert told Reuters.
The destruction of the 120,000-tonne capacity structure and of the port, the main entry point for food imports, means buyers will have to rely on smaller private storage facilities for their wheat purchases with no government reserves to fall back on, exacerbating fears of food shortages.
Lebanon, a nation of an estimated 6 million people, buys almost all of its wheat from abroad. But the state’s food security plans did not include keeping a government-held reserve, a common practice in most countries heavily dependent on imports, for use in the event of emergencies.
“In terms of grain silos, that was the only major one,” Maurice Saade, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) representative in Lebanon, told Reuters.
“The Beirut port silo main function is not meant to be for strategic grain reserves. Its main function is operational serving as temporary storage for imported grain until the grain is transported to the mills,” he said.
Dozens are still missing after Tuesday’s explosion at the port that killed at least 154 people, injured 5,000 and left up to 250,000 homeless, in a country already hammered by an economic meltdown and a surge in corona virus cases.
With banks in crisis and one of the world’s biggest public debt burdens, Economy Minister Raoul Nehme has said Lebanon had “very limited” resources to deal with the disaster, which by some estimates may have cost the nation up to 15 billion$.
Still, Nehme has reassured the public that there would be no flour or bread crisis. When asked by Reuters on Thursday about government stocks, he said there were none.
He also told Reuters his ministry had been planning to create a strategic reserve of around 40,000 tonnes but had not managed to do so yet.
“I saw we didn’t have a strategic stock, decided to buy one and got the approval of the council of ministers,” he said, adding that they had been in the final stages of negotiations.
The lack of state reserves is compounded by the lack of a dedicated grain terminal and silo in Tripoli port, where vessels are now being diverted, and illustrates a hand-to-mouth approach to food security.
It mirrors how the state has resorted to emergency plans rather than long-term solutions in other key areas, such as its infamously flawed power sector and messy garbage collection, moving from one quick fix to another since the end of the 1975-1990 civil war.
On Friday, the World Food Program expressed its concern that the damage to the port of Beirut would exacerbate an already difficult food security situation.
Source: Reuters
