Tobacco Farming in Aytroun: A Story of Resilience and Survival

Report by Nada Andraos, English adaptation by Nadine Sassine 

Ibrahim Abdel-Monem, a tobacco farmer from the border town of Aytroun, is the only citizen who refused to evacuate from his village during the ongoing confrontation between the Israeli army and Hezbollah for over four months. He insisted on plowing the land, waiting for the planting season to sow it with tobacco seeds.

Aytroun, located in the Bint Jbeil district, is among the most vulnerable towns to Israeli shelling in the ongoing confrontation there. It ranks first in tobacco production in the South, accounting for about 5% of the total southern production, followed by Rmeish with 4.5%.

In this land in the town of Maaroub in the Tyre district, the t the Regie Libanaise des Tabacs et Tombacs, Lebanon's government-owned tobacco company, allocated 13 dunums of this property for planting tobacco seeds in preparation for the season of distributing seedlings to southern farmers who were deprived of preparing their lands, hoping for an end to the war and the return of landowners to their land.

Tobacco is the resistant plant, just like the people of this land, resisting to stay and refusing to be uprooted despite all the storms. Today's war is not the first witnessed by the South, yet the Southerners returned to their land to plow it and plant tobacco seedlings.

These seedlings give them prosperous seasons, constituting a significant source of their livelihood and a fundamental pillar of the border region's economy and the South in general.