Lebanon: Apple farmers to stage sit-in to protest lack of support
“We should be exporting a minimum of 70,000 tons a year.”
Semaan said farmers would be dumping apples on the roads from the south to the north of Lebanon Saturday, while the main sit-in would take place in Tarshish.
“We will also be distributing apples to people on the streets,” Semaan said.
Semaan said that farmers were carrying out this sit-in to protest the government’s gross negligence of this sector.
“We don’t want the government to give us money, we just want them to support us with the cost of storing our produce in refrigerators, in addition to helping us with the high cost of shipping to Egypt and to other Arab countries,” he said.
Semaan argued that farmers were not able to store their apples because spaces in refrigerators were filled with potatoes instead. He said refrigerator owners had increased the fees for storing produce because of the high cost of diesel for operating their generators in the absence of regular electricity.
Farmers have on many occasions complained about their inability to store their produce in refrigerators, which allows retail and wholesale merchants to control the prices in the market.
“Farmers are incapable of properly storing their produce, which prompts them to sell it all at once at any price,” he said, adding that merchants took advantage of this situation by buying a kilo of apples for as little as LL400.
President of the Farmers’ Association Antoine Hwayek has previously called upon the government to implement a law issued in 1994 that calls for the establishment of an agricultural development bank.
Hwayek said that the Association of Banks in Lebanon and some bank owners had long opposed the establishment of such a bank. He added that the commercial banks would not be capable of offering farmers the same facilities that the agricultural development bank would be able to.
“Commercial banks require collateral as guarantees, while the agricultural development bank would accept the farmers’ produce as a guarantee for instance,” he said.
Semaan also complained about the cost of shipping, which has increased remarkably since the Syrian war started. “The cost of shipping has more than doubled ever since the crisis in Syria began,” he said.
“We used to pay around $2,000 for shipping 27 tons by land, but now we pay around $3,500 to ship the same volume by the sea.”
Source: dailystar.com.lb
