Lebanon War Claims Tobacco Crop as Well, Farmers Say

Source from:  Reuters By Tom Perry QANA, Lebanon, Aug 20 08/21/2006

Their villages have been bombed and relatives killed. In addition, the farmers of south Lebanon say war with Israel has cost them the tobacco crop that is their livelihood. Across the south, green fields have gone untended since Israel's war with Hizbollah erupted on July 12. Although most fighting ended last week, farmers say the crop is spoiled because it has been left unpicked for too long. "A war of one month has ruined the crop of one year," said Sameh Shalhoub, who farms tobacco around the village of Qana, where an Israeli attack killed 27 civilians. Tobacco farming supports 14,000 families, or around 100,000 people, in the rural south, an official from the state's tobacco authority said. Farmers usually plant their crop between February and March and harvest between June and August, so well over half the picking season had been lost, he said. In a room where villagers gathered to mourn the dead, dried tobacco leaves had been bound together and wrapped in sackcloth for sale. The lone bundle represented only a fraction of what the farmers should have harvested by mid-August. "The leaf has to contain certain physical and chemical properties when you pick it, otherwise it is spoilt," the official said. In the village of Sriefa, the tobacco which had been harvested lay in a pile on the ground, incinerated by bombs which had turned building after building to rubble. DANGER IN THE OLIVE GROVES Lines of tobacco leaves had been hung up to dry from the ceiling of one building, its front torn off by a blast. More than a month of heavy Israeli bombardment of the south, Hizbollah's heartland, had forced villagers to abandon their homes and crops to flee to safer places. The conflict began after Hizbollah captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid on July 12, saying it wanted to trade them for Lebanese and Arab prisoners held in Israel. Even though most fighting is over, farmers in Qana will not go into the hills and valleys around their village because of the danger of unexploded bombs hidden in the soil. They passed around a leaflet warning them not to approach "strange bodies" -- the phrase used by Lebanese to describe the array of bombs dropped by Israel which did not explode. "We are scared of going out into the fields. That's the war we are now fighting -- the war of the strange bodies," Qana farmer Mahmoud Shalhoub said. The U.N. estimates that 10 percent of munitions fail to explode. On that basis, there could be 8,000 to 9,000 bombs waiting to go off in the south, it says. "Bombs would fall, you'd hear a thud, see a cloud of dust but hear no explosion," Shalhoub said. "We are waiting for the experts." Although tobacco is their main crop, the villagers also grow figs and peaches. Olive trees cover the hills around the village. Taking a decade before they yield fruit, olive trees are precious to their owners. Shalhoub pointed to a scorched hillside where olive trees had been turned to charcoal and torn from the ground. "It's just a small part of the damage," he said. "Each bomb destroyed 30 trees." Enditem