For the past 5 years, Lebanon has been experiencing a multi-faceted crisis. Socio-economic, financial, geopolitical, health and humanitarian, it is unprecedented and is hitting the Lebanese people hard. Lebanon’s agricultural sector has not been spared, and with almost half of the country’s population living below the poverty line, access to healthy, affordable food is becoming increasingly difficult.
With this in mind, Omar Abodib, Director of the Le Cèdre Hospitality hotel and restaurant group and chairman of the Le Cèdre Solidarity endowment fund, decided to make a human and financial commitment to the Terre Fertile project. In 2023, he made a family plot of fallow land available for the project, initiated by the L’Ancre Bleue association and its president Youmna Bureau, a Franco-Lebanese agronomist.
Terre Fertile’s goal is ambitious: to make market gardening a driver for sustainable regional development, creating jobs and strengthening food sovereignty in Lebanon. To achieve this, the Terre Fertile teams cultivate 2,700 m2 of land in northern Lebanon using the bio-intensive market gardening method, a demanding and rigorous method that encourages high yields while limiting the impact on biodiversity and soil health.
This method, developed and refined over the past 20 years by Jean-Martin Fortier in Quebec, had never before been used in Lebanon, even though it offers a number of advantages: practical (the organization of cultivation allows all equipment to be standardized), economic (the use of manual tools is favored over that of heavy machinery), and ecological (tilling the soil only on the surface creates a rich, living soil and encourages the storage of CO2 emissions).
Its application makes it possible to grow healthy, nutritious vegetables, adapting to the country’s agro-climatic conditions. It offers Cedar Solidarity the opportunity to grow its crops without damaging non-renewable natural resources.
In the coming months, Cedre Solidarity and L’Ancre Bleue’s ambition for Terre Fertile is simple: to share the knowledge they have acquired by training young Lebanese agronomists in bio-intensive market gardening and supporting them in setting up their own organic farms.
Would you like to support Terre Fertile? Please do! Each and every one of your donations counts, enabling us to develop this wonderful project in Lebanon. You can make a donation on the website www.lecedre-solidarity.com Thank you very much!
For further information: https://www.lecedre-solidarity.com/nosprojets/terre-fertile
