Word: bekaa
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Lebanon's anti-drug squad and the handful of soldiers protecting them had an unpleasant surprise last month when they launched an annual raid on fields of ripe hashish in the northern Bekaa Valley. Rather than standing aside meekly while their hashish was ploughed up as in the past, the farmers this year were determined to protect their lucrative crops. "They shot at us with automatic weapons from nearby woods and houses," Colonel Adel Machmouchi, head of Lebanon's Drug Enforcement Bureau, told TIME. "RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades] were exploding above our heads and we had to leave...
Taking advantage of a debilitating political crisis in Beirut, overstretched security forces and a lifeless economy, the Bekaa farmers this year have cultivated the largest hashish harvest since the war-torn 1980s when this fertile valley was awash with drug crops. Lebanese police estimate that some 16,000 acres (6,500 hectares) of hashish and a small amount of opium poppies were planted this year on the sun-baked plain of the northern Bekaa. "Lebanese hashish is the best in the world, better than Turkey and Afghanistan," says Ali, a Bekaa farmer standing in his field of knee-high hashish...
Long grown in the fertile Bekaa, cultivation of the cannabis sativa plant peaked during Lebanon's 1975-1990 civil war when the northern half of the valley was carpeted in hashish and opium poppies, turning simple farmers into multi-millionaire drug barons. In the early 1990s, the Lebanese government and the United Nations Development Program launched an initiative to replace drug crops with legitimate alternatives. The UNDP estimated some $300 million was required for rural development of the Bekaa. Lebanon was removed from the U.S. government's list of major drug producing countries...
...going to grow hashish and we don't care what the government says or tries to do," said Ahmad, a hashish farmer. It is an argument that fails to win the sympathy of Lebanon's drug police. "Does poverty in Lebanon only exist in the Bekaa?" asks Colonel Machmouchi. "No, but it's the only area growing hashish." The problem, he added, is that the farmers of the Bekaa are so accustomed to growing hashish that they no longer consider the practice a crime. "The solution is to change their culture, but that will take years," he said...
...Unfortunately, Lebanon's recent troubles cloud the outlook for the wine industry. This year, impoverished Bekaa farmers took advantage of the security forces' being distracted by the protracted battle against Islamist radicals holed up in a Palestinian refugee camp, to plant another of the Bekaa's fabled crops: hashish. Hashish farming threatens to gobble up land that could be used for vineyards, and creates a get-rich-quick gangster culture that's at odds with the patient investment necessary to produce wine...