Introduction

“Land for those who work it.” This popular slogan, heralded by anti-colonialists and anti-imperialists worldwide, as well as by peasant movements such as La Via Campesina and the Landless Workers’ Movement in Brazil, encapsulates a global demand for agrarian reforms that put peasants at the heart of food systems. Yet while global conversations about food production and rural development have had to confront the uncomfortable issue of land tenure, in Lebanon land remains the elephant in the room of national agrarian policy debates.

The question of land distribution and access in Lebanon touches on the very foundations of the country’s political economy, which is based on rent extraction, clientelism, and elite capture. A tangle of different land regimes has enabled political and economic elites to continuously convert land into speculative private assets, slowly eroding the social value of land while turning it into a commodity and a source of political power. The persistence of land-based power and elite resistance has historically blocked any meaningful structural reform. In parallel, by preferring donor-driven, technical interventions in agrarian and food policies that avoid the core issue of unequal land access, the Lebanese state functions as a guarantor of existing class structures.

This article argues that reforming land access in Lebanon is the essential structural condition for cultivating a fair and sustainable agricultural system rooted in agroecology. It also proposes specific reformist policies and measures toward that goal. In the current political landscape, redistributive land reform – the transfer of tenure rights to new beneficiaries to provide more equitable access – remains distant. Nevertheless, pragmatic alternatives exist to improve land access to vulnerable communities and safeguard precarious agricultural lands. These include strengthening the use of communal amiri lands, protecting agricultural zones from speculation, and activating idle land.

The Roots of Land Inequality in Lebanon

From the Ottoman land regime to the French Mandate, through independence and up to the civil war, Lebanon’s history has been marked by a succession of land configurations that profoundly structured power relations and territorial control. During the Ottoman Empire’s Tanzimat reforms (1839-1876), the land code of 1858 was introduced to centralize and systematize land taxation. It introduced five categories of land: amiri, state-owned lands with usufruct rights granted to individuals; mulk, private property; waqf, lands endowed to religious institutions; mawat, uncultivated or remote lands; and metruk, lands reserved for collective use such as roads, forests, and pastures. These reforms allowed local elites to exploit the system by registering land in their name often without clear spatial demarcation, thus leading to the accumulation of land in the hands of notables.¹A. Reza Hoshmand and Dany Abdul Hafiz Doueiri, “The Historical Dimensions of Agricultural Policy in Lebanon”, Journal of South Asian and Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 21, no. 4, 1998 (Hoshmand and Doueiri, “Historical Dimensions of Agricultural Policy”). The number of private property titles, and the area they covered, increased drastically during the Tanzimat period, converting most of the land in Mount Lebanon into mulk. This arrangement differed from neighboring regions such as Baalbek and Akkar, which later became part of greater Lebanon in 1920, where amiri and metruk lands were cultivated under the collectively managed musha’ system.²Musha’ lands are agricultural commons jointly owned by the community and subject to light taxation, as defined in the 1858 Land Code. For more, see Petra Samaha, Land as a Cash Machine: The Case of Lebanon, Arab Land Initiative, 2022 (Samaha, Land as a Cash Machine). Thus, from its inception, land governance in Lebanon was heterogenous, shaped by the administrative legacies of its regions.

During the French Mandate period (1920-1943), reforms continued with the establishment of the Régie de Travaux du Cadastre et d’Aménagement Foncière (Department of Land Registry and Development Work) in 1920, aimed at modernizing land administration and ensuring a better distribution and more efficient taxation of property. In the newly annexed regions of greater Lebanon, a land redistribution policy transformed musha’ lands into private property.³Elizabeth Williams, “Mapping the Cadastre, Producing the Fellah: Technologies and Discourses of Rule in French Mandate Syria and Lebanon”, in The Routledge Handbook of the History of the Middle East Mandates, 2015 (Williams, “Mapping the Cadastre”). The 1930 Real Property Law, a hybrid between the Ottoman and French land regimes, further blurred the distinction between state domains and private holdings, enabling elite capture and fragmenting public land governance.⁴Petra Samaha, “When Land Became Property in Lebanon. The Transformation of Land Codes Since 1858 and its Implications on Planning and Public Lands”, Planning Perspectives, 2025, pp. 1-25. Supported by local elites, these measures facilitated the appropriation of land by a few notables at the expense of collective ownership and land-use rights.⁵Abdallah Hanna, “The Attitude of the French Mandatory Authorities Towards Land Ownership in Syria”, in The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspectives, 2004, pp. 457-475. In this process, the land registry, far from being a simple technical tool for land management, served as a key instrument in the consolidation of land power and the production of fiscal inequalities.⁶Williams, “Mapping the Cadastre”. By 1925, a marked concentration of land ownership had taken place in the Beqaa, where nearly 78% of the land was held by a small number of families.⁷Hoshmand and Doueiri, “Historical Dimensions of Agricultural Policy”; Williams, “Mapping the Cadastre”. This was also the case for Sinay in south Lebanon, which in 1939 was registered as the exclusive property of a single landowner: an influential political figure from the city of Saida whose descendant now sits in the Lebanese parliament.⁸Saker El Nour, Cynthia Gharios, Martha Mundy, and Rami Zurayk, “Le droit au village? Concept et histoire dans un village du Sud-Liban” (French), Justice spatiale/Spatial justice, Vol 7, 2015. Moreover, even though more than half of the territory was surveyed and added to the cadastral register, many gaps in the Ottoman code were left unaddressed, leaving persistent ambiguities that favored elite appropriation.⁹Samaha, Land as a Cash Machine.

After gaining independence in 1943, Lebanon inherited a legal framework full of loopholes and discretionary decrees that allowed the conversion of public lands into private property, undermining the principle of land as a common good.¹⁰Samaha, Land as a Cash Machine. Instead of reforming Franco–Ottoman land management, the Lebanese authorities perpetuated policies that allowed elites to expand their control over land. The lack of a comprehensive cadastral survey, combined with the use of historical archives as proof of ownership, fostered gradual encroachment on public and communal lands.¹¹Samar Farhat, “Sustainable Land Development and Management in Rural Areas: The Case of Kafra, South Lebanon”, Master’s thesis, American University of Beirut, 2022. This process, which local elites skillfully exploited, accelerated the speculative appropriation of land to the detriment of traditional collective uses.¹²Tala Alaeddine and Abir Saksouk, “Land Policy and Environmental Justice: The Case of Publicly Owned Properties in Lebanon”, Middle Eastern Cities in a Time of Climate Crisis, CEDEJ - Égypte/Soudan, 2022, available at https://doi.org/10.4000/books.cedej.8569 (Alaeddine and Saksouk, “Land Policy and Environmental Justice”).

The political economy of postindependence Lebanon was completely subordinated to the interests of an economic elite who favored unbridled economic liberalism and was keen on developing an extroverted, tertiary economic sector based on Beirut’s role as an intermediary between the West and the emerging oil markets of the Arabian Peninsula and Iraq.¹³Fawaz Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon, Pluto Press, 2015, (Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon). In agricultural policy, this approach allowed Lebanon to become an exporter of fruit and poultry to the Gulf markets given their comparative agricultural deficit and growing solvency.¹⁴Pierre Blanc, Proche-Orient, Le pouvoir, la terre et l’eau (French), Presses de Sciences Po, 2012, available at https://shs.cairn.info/proche-orient--9782724612615-page-51?lang=fr (Blanc, Proche-Orient). However, this export-oriented policy also meant that agricultural workers and agricultural sectors were neglected.¹⁵Pierre Blanc, “L’agriculture au Liban: Entre contraintes géopolitiques et retrait du politique” (French), Maghreb - Machrek, Vol. 215, no.1, pp. 81-99, 2013, available at https://doi.org/10.3917/machr.215.0081 (Blanc, “L’agriculture au Liban”). Between 1950 and 1974, the agricultural sector went from constituting 20% of GDP and 55% of employment to only 9% and 22%, respectively. By contrast, the contribution of the service sector to GDP increased from 66% to 73% and to employment from 34% to 61% during the same period.¹⁶Toufic Gaspard, A Political Economy of Lebanon, 1948-2002: The Limits of Laissez-Faire, BRILL, 2003.

After the civil war (1975-1990), the financialization of land became a defining feature of Lebanon’s economic strategy.¹⁷Samaha, Land as a Cash Machine. Supported by remittances from the diaspora and capital from the Arab Gulf states, land and real estate became the main investment vehicle, leading to a drastic increase in land values.¹⁸Hannes Baumann, Citizen Hariri: Lebanon’s Neo-Liberal Reconstruction, Oxford University Press, 2016. The state, weakened by internal conflicts and elite capture, gave way to governance dominated by private interests. This system generated spatial inequalities, the disappearance of agricultural land, and a degradation of public goods, reducing land to a simple speculative asset serving the accumulation of capital by a minority.¹⁹Samaha, Land as a Cash Machine.

The Effects of Land Inequality on Agricultural Labor and Production

Like Syria and Egypt after their independence, Lebanon inherited a situation of heightened land inequality where the power of political elites was underpinned by their land-based power. While this imbalance had been partially resolved in Syria and Egypt by governments pursuing ambitious nationalist agricultural policies, the influence of large landowners remained an obstacle to agricultural development in Lebanon.²⁰Blanc, “L’agriculture au Liban”. For example, Syrian land reform in the early 1960s expropriated 80% of the land held by large landowners in the Qusayr border region. This reform granted equal exploitation rights and access to agricultural services to Syrian and Lebanese sharecroppers established on both sides of the border.²¹Kanj Hamade, Pierre Blanc, Ronald Jaubert, and Myriam Saadé-Sbeih, “De part et d’autre de la frontière libano-syrienne : les mutations de l’agriculture du Haut Oronte” (French), Confluences Méditerranée, Vol. 92, no.1, 2015.

In Lebanon, the emergence and expansion of large capitalist farms since the 1950s led not only to the intensification of land inequality but also to a transformation of agricultural labor and the decline of sharecropping, which fell from 25% of the agricultural labor force in 1950 to only 5% in 1970.²²Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon. In search of higher productivity, landowners evicted many sharecroppers, who were forced to migrate to Beirut in search of work. Affecting nearly 20% of the rural population in the 1960s, forced displacement contributed to the creation of a precarious urban proletariat deprived of basic social and economic rights.²³William Thomson, Cynthia Gharios and Rami Zurayk, “From silk to concrete: exploring the socio-spatial aspects of the Agrarian question(s) in Mount Lebanon”, The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol. 50, no.4, 2023 (Thomson et al., “From silk to concrete”). Others turned to waged agricultural work in difficult conditions and with minimal pay due to the abundance of cheap labor, particularly in the form of Palestinian refugees and Syrian migrants. In 1970, Lebanon had approximately 30,000 Lebanese and 15,000 Syrian and Palestinian agricultural workers.²⁴Salim Nasr, “Backdrop to Civil War: The Crisis of Lebanese Capitalism”, MERIP Reports, Vol. 73, 1978.

It was in this tense socioeconomic context that several rural mobilizations against precarious working conditions and unjust tenancy structures took place. Starting in 1968, landless sharecroppers on the Akkar plain revolted against absentee landlords and evictions. In 1970, tenant farmers of Maronite convents in Tannourine and Mayfouq mobilized for fairer crop shares and land distribution. In 1973, tobacco peasants in the south challenged exploitative licensing and pricing policies, demanding better prices and more rights.²⁵Rossana Tufaro, “The Intifāḍat Al-Dikhān: Elements of Peasant Conflict in the South of Lebanon on the Eve of the Civil War”, Rivista Degli Studi Orientali XCVI, Vol. 2, no. 4, 2023. These mobilizations coalesced into the formation of the national union of agricultural workers, whose congress in 1973 brought together 163 villages. The union campaigned against price hikes of agricultural inputs and the abusive practices of intermediaries. Crucially, farmers also demanded a fairer tenancy code that would facilitate their access to land, as well as their admission to the national social security fund.²⁶Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon. These peasant movements were inscribed within wider demands for socioeconomic change that echoed within the country in the early 1970s. Yet the political system, paralyzed and riddled with internal contradictions and conflicts, proved unable to carry out the reforms needed to confront the crisis.

Today, land remains a central issue of power, resource control, and social justice, revealing the fault lines between landowning elites and marginalized rural populations. Faced with long-standing socioeconomic pressures, compounded by the 2019 economic and financial crisis, small landowners are often forced to make short-term decisions, to the detriment of long-term sustainability.²⁷Abed Al Kareem Yehya, Thanh Thi Nguyen, Martin Wiehle, Rami Zurayk and Andreas Buerkert, “Six Decades of Rural Landscape Transformation in Five Lebanese Villages”, Land, Vol. 14, no. 2, 2025. Ineffective and outdated land management policies force farmers to adapt to market trends to ensure their livelihoods or to invest in real estate, leading to a drastic transformation of the Lebanese rural landscape.²⁸Thomson et al., “From silk to concrete”. Moreover, the refusal of successive governments to formalize tenancy contracts for periods longer than a single agricultural season – which would grant peasants the security and stability needed for long-term economic and agricultural planning – reflects the persistence of the land problem in a region where large-scale land ownership remains predominant.²⁹Blanc, Proche-Orient. According to the latest agricultural census in 2010, 70% of farmers cultivate less than one hectare, while 4% of farms cover more than 6 hectares.³⁰See Lebanese Republic Ministry of Agriculture, Lebanon National Agriculture Strategy—NAS 2020-2025, 2020. The agricultural value chain is composed on one side of large export-oriented agroindustrial farms and, on the other, of small, undercapitalized farms. This dynamic is reflected in the unequal distribution of land tenure: 10% of landowners own 60.6% of agricultural land, and 1% of landowners own 26.5%.³¹Kanj Hamade, “Lebanon’s Agriculture: Dynamics of Contraction in the Absence of Public Vision and Policies”, 2019, available at https://www.annd.org/data/file/files/13%20lebanon%20.pdf (Hamade, “Lebanon’s Agriculture”). Large, absentee-owned estates are typically cultivated with fruit (often citrus fruits or avocados) for export and intensive crops such as potatoes. The largest private farms in Lebanon can be traced to influential politicians across all faiths and political affiliations.³²Gherbal Initiative, Political Figures’ Properties, 2025, available at https://elgherbal.org/political-properties; Hamade, “Lebanon’s Agriculture”.

By contrast, half of Lebanon’s farms occupy less than 10% of the country’s cultivated land. These lands are often farmed traditionally, with limited access to agricultural credit or informal forms of lending. Agricultural production is affected by price fluctuations, intermediaries’ margins, high production prices, low capitalization, and the lack of functional cooperatives.³³Hamade, “Lebanon’s Agriculture”.

Moreover, most agricultural work remains informal and precarious, outside the framework of the labor code with only 8% formally employed.³⁴See FAO & ILO, Skills Development for Inclusive Growth in the Lebanese Agriculture Sector, 2020, available at https://openknowledge.fao.org/items/494d5382-9980-4bfb-b81f-afb67bf6c857 As a result, farmers and salaried agricultural workers do not benefit from any public health coverage or pension funds. Furthermore, the World Bank estimates that after the 2019 economic crisis, 58% of agricultural households live below the poverty line.³⁵See World Bank, Lebanon Poverty and Equity Assessment: Weathering a Protracted Crisis, 2024, available at https://documents1.worldbank.org/curated/en/099052224104516741/pdf/P1766511325da10a71ab6b1ae97816dd20c.pdf The influx of Syrian labor beginning in 1990 at the end of the civil war, and then of Syrian refugees fleeing the war in their country beginning in 2011, exerted additional pressure on the agricultural labor market, opening the doors for exploitation and further precarity.³⁶Nur Arafeh and Mayssoun Sukarieh, “Breaking the Cycle: Toward a New Imaginary of the Food System in Lebanon”, The Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center, 2023, available at https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2023/07/breaking-the-cycle-toward-a-new-imaginary-of-the-food-system-in-lebanon?lang=en In 2016, the sector employed around 200,000 Syrian workers, both permanent and seasonal, representing 80% of salaried agricultural workers.³⁷Kanj Hamade, “Agriculture as a key to the resilience of Lebanon rural areas to the effect of the Syrian Crisis”, CIHEAM Watch Letter 36, 2016.

Impediments to Agricultural Reform

Given the decades-long inequalities in land access and the resulting precarious conditions of agricultural work, it becomes pertinent to question why no sustainable solutions or structural reforms in land tenure or the agricultural sector have yet been implemented. Despite some attempts, particularly during Fouad Chehab’s term in office in the 1950s, the threat that state-led development and modernization projects posed to the economic and clientelist interests of the political and economic elite made their implementation difficult.³⁸Traboulsi, A History of Modern Lebanon; Albert Turquieh, “Développement économique et planification au Liban: 1958-1970” (French), Monde Arabe, Vol. 57 no.3, 1978, available at https://doi.org/10.3917/machr1.057.0072; Blanc, Proche-Orient; Blanc, “L’agriculture au Liban”.

As Mona Harb notes, urban and land-use planning, once conceived as tools for the public good, have been hollowed out and redeployed to reproduce an oligarchic, sectarian political economy in which private property is sacralized and territorial regulation reduced to a technical vocabulary of zoning and expropriation rights, stripped of social purpose.³⁹Interview with Mona Harb, from the American University of Beirut, on 26 November 2025 (Interview with Mona Harb). Institutions such as the Directorate General of Urban Planning and strategic frameworks like the Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement du Territoire Libanais (the Lebanese Territorial Development Master Plan) have either been co-opted for sectarian and speculative gains or left wholly unimplemented, reinforcing a political culture where land is understood primarily as a commodity and a vehicle for rent extraction rather than a collective resource.⁴⁰Interview with Mona Harb.

As a result, the solutions and strategies proposed by the Lebanese state are often donor-oriented, reflecting the hegemony of commercial agriculture and failing to address the sector’s key legal and policy issues.⁴¹Kanj Hamadé, “Lebanon’s Food Insecurity and the Path Toward Agricultural Reform”, Carnegie Middle East Center, 13 November 2020, https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2020/12/lebanons-food-insecurity-and-the-path-toward-agricultural-reform?lang=en&center=middle-east The recently proposed seed law emerges from this same logic: behind a technocratic façade of regulation, the draft law introduces a commercialized regime that undermines local seed systems, weakens biodiversity, and opens the door to monopolization by traders and multinational seed companies, effectively extending the commodification of land into the genetic foundations of agriculture itself.⁴²Magaphone, “The law regulating the seed trade: The war between traders and the government against the ‘public environmental interest’” (in Arabic), 29 November 2025, https://megaphone.news/oped/قانون-تنظيم-تجارة-البذور (Megaphone, “The Law regulating the seed trade” ) Seed registration thus becomes another mechanism for enclosing the environmental commons, subjecting farmers to dependence and deepening the privatization of essential, historically shared resources.⁴³(Megaphone, “The Law regulating the seed trade” )

Kanj Hamade identifies four essential reforms toward sustainable rural development that would improve the situation of farmers and agricultural workers in the long-term: formalizing agricultural labor, reforming land tenure, expanding the law regulating cooperatives, and encouraging competitiveness by breaking up monopolies.⁴⁴Hamade, 2020. Focusing on the category of land tenure and access, the following section advances pragmatic yet critical reforms.

Fields of Reform

Several studies have shown the positive links between secure land access and the expansion of agroecological approaches, the improvement of environmental sustainability, and the reduction of poverty and hunger.⁴⁵Colin Ray Anderson et al., “From Transition to Domains of Transformation: Getting to Sustainable and Just Food Systems through Agroecology,” Sustainability, Vol. 11 no. 9, 2019; Hannah Wittman, Dana James, “Land governance for agroecology,” Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene, Vol. 10 no. 1, 2022. Crucially, improvements in the conditions of marginalized agricultural producers depend on land reform that effectively rebalances sociopolitical power tied to land ownership.⁴⁶Michael Lipton, Land Reform in Developing Countries: Property Rights and Property Wrongs, Routledge, 2009. In this context, redistributive land reform represents an important policy instrument, as it addresses both the material need for land access and the structural inequalities of ownership and power that constrain the agricultural sector. Practically, it allows the transfer of property rights from large landowners to small farmers in order to provide more equitable access to land.⁴⁷ESCWA, “Redistributive Land Reform; Redistributive Reform”, 27 September 2025, available at https://www.unescwa.org/sd-glossary/redistributive-land-reform-redistributive-reform

However, such policies would go against the interests of a political elite that has historically derived its power from large property holdings. Policy implementation would also face a fragmented governance and a legal framework that favors privatization. By way of illustration, a section of the ruling elite is proposing, through several bills, the privatization of state assets, particularly amiri land, as a potential solution to the current economic crisis. These lands compose 52% of the Lebanese state’s land with 78% of it in the Beqaa, a critical agricultural region. Amiri lands constitute a form of accessible public property, particularly for marginalized populations. Their free use, which is open to non-nationals and transferable on an equal basis, promotes collective land management, breaking with the dominant model of private ownership. In contrast, privatization attempts reflect a clientelist system where land rights are used for political purposes to the detriment of the common good and the real needs of the sector.⁴⁸Alaeddine and Saksouk, “Land Policy and Environmental Justice”. Privatizing this land risks exacerbating inequalities without truly contributing to resolving the economic crisis or reducing public debt, while further weakening the state.⁴⁹Albert Kostanian, “Privatization of Lebanon’s Public Assets: No Miracle Solution for the Crisis”, Issam Fares Institute, American University of Beirut, 2021, available at https://www.aub.edu.lb/ifi/Documents/publications/research_reports/2020-2021/20210222_Privatization_of_Lebanon_Public_Assets_Research_Report.pdf

While fair land redistribution remains the ideal pathway to address structural inequalities in agriculture, Lebanon’s political and economic realities make such reforms unlikely, requiring instead alternative strategies to improve land access and equity.

First, practitioners and scholars actively engaged in urban planning advocacy should suggest strengthening the use of amiri land.⁵⁰Interview with Tala Alaeddine, from the Public Works Studio, on 15 September 2025 (Interview with Tala Alaeddine). Lebanon should adopt a national policy to protect and expand amiri-designated land, which constitute vast tracts of public property critical to agriculture and rural livelihoods across the country. These lands – as seen in Tyre, where 62% of the amiri land is used to support over 150 Palestinian refugee families – demonstrate how public ownership paired with secure usufruct rights can sustain food production, protect communities from displacement, and counter land speculation.⁵¹Nadine Bekdache and Jana Haidar, “Land belongs to those who cultivate it: The rights holders of in Shabriha”, Public Works Studio 16 July 2024, https://publicworksstudio.com/en/land-belongs-to-those-who-cultivate-it/; Public Works Studio, “Distribution of Private State Property in Tyre City, Borj Ech-Chemali and Aabbassiye”, 12 May 2023, available at https://publicworksstudio.com/en/distribution-of-private-state-property-in-tyre-borj-ech-chemali-aabbassiye/ Under a dedicated legal and administrative framework that clarifies their governance, a nationwide effort should map, safeguard, and where possible reclaim underused state property for agricultural and community use, embedding amiri lands as a cornerstone of Lebanon’s food security and social equity strategies.

Second, urban planners and advocates recommend improving land-use planning and protection.⁵²Interview with Tala Alaeddine. A major impediment to land access in Lebanon is the lack of efficient land-use planning and protection measures. Many fertile agricultural zones, like the Zahrani plain, are devoid of any formal planning framework, making them especially vulnerable to reclassification for building or tourism projects. This is exacerbated by the failure to implement the Schéma Directeur d’Aménagement du Territoire Libanais, the national master plan intended to protect areas of agricultural significance.⁵³Interview with Mona Harb; Interview with Tala Alaeddine. The Schéma Directeur must be revised to align with contemporary circumstances, recognizing that certain agricultural regions have been irrevocably lost to urbanization while guaranteeing that all remaining active farmland is explicitly safeguarded under national and municipal strategies. In parallel, the development of a comprehensive agricultural land-use map is needed to provide reliable data on crop distribution, land potential, and infrastructure requirements. Such a tool would enable evidence-based planning and prevent arbitrary or politically motivated reclassification of land.

Third, and drawing on Brazil’s social function of property concept, some recommend the implementation of regulation that would activate idle or underused land.⁵⁴Gabriel Ondetti, “The social function of property, land rights and social welfare in Brazil”, Land Use Policy, Vol. 50, 2016; Interview with Tala Alaeddine. One example is implementing fiscal penalties for idle land, coupled with incentives for productive utilization, to promote more effective and socially responsible land management. Along the same lines, it is crucial that religious endowment (waqf) lands contribute socially through fair leasing for agricultural use when possible or fair taxation. Municipalities also play a significant role in fulfilling the social role of land. Communal lands within municipalities (metruk) – historically consisting of threshing floors or pastures – can be mobilized for community farming projects with municipalities overseeing management and redistributing the benefits. By reinforcing national and local planning instruments and linking them to a clear agricultural strategy, Lebanon can reduce speculative pressures, protect its most fertile lands, and ensure that agricultural areas continue to fulfill their essential social and productive functions.

Conclusion

Forged by a long history of fragmented legal regimes and elite accumulation, land dynamics in Lebanon continue to perpetuate patterns of exclusion. Reforming access to land is not only a structural condition for building a fair and sustainable agricultural system, but also a social imperative centered on recognizing and protecting the rights of agricultural workers. This article has proposed three categories of critical policy reform: strengthening the use of amiri lands, improving land-use planning and protection, and activating idle or underused land through new regulations.

In concluding this analysis of land reform in Lebanon, it is also important to recognize the nonstate initiatives carving out experimental spaces that expand the horizon of commoning, even when their access to land remains contingent and precarious.⁵⁵Interview with Mona Harb. Against threats to even further enclosure of land and even seeds, and amid exclusionary state planning, agroecology initiatives such as Buzuruna Juzuruna, Nohye el Ard, and the AgriMovement, have recently emerged centered around agroecology: a comprehensive approach to food system sustainability that integrates research, education, and practice across the ecological, economic, and social dimensions of agriculture.⁵⁶Steve Gliessman, “Defining Agroecology”, Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems, Vol. 42 no. 6, 2018. By valuing diverse forms of knowledge and involving all stakeholders of our food systems, agroecology challenges industrial food system power structures through alternative practices and policies. The formal launch of the Agroecology Coalition in November 2025 further politicizes these efforts by articulating agroecology not only as a technical alternative but as a struggle for food sovereignty, democratic control over resources, and rooted in agrarian realities.⁵⁷Amani Beainy “Food for all: Launch of a coalition to protect environmental agriculture” (in Arabic), The Legal Agenda, 24 November 2025, available at https://legal-agenda.com/صار-في-أكل-لكلّ-الناس-إطلاق-ائتلاف-لحم/

In this sense, agroecology initiatives and the new coalition function as reformist yet transformative actors: they contest the commodification of both land and seeds, reclaim agrarian knowledge as a shared heritage, and sketch the contours of a new commons-based paradigm emerging within a hostile political economy. Their practices reveal that while structural reforms remain blocked, alternative forms of land stewardship, seed sovereignty, and collective production continue to materialize in the cracks of the current land and food regimes, suggesting that the political imagination around land can still be rebuilt from below.