The Saidoun cluster of agricultural villages is comprised of five towns — Deir Qattine, Hidab, Rimate, Saidoun, and Sanaya — which, together, are home to around of 3,000 residents, including 300 Syrian refugees. The local cooperative supports farmers by distributing seedlings and facilitating irrigation. However, as a result of the ongoing economic crisis and consequent devaluation of the local currency, the cooperative and its farmers have been struggling with a significant increase in production costs, leading to growing communal tensions over income-generation opportunities. In response, USAID’s Community Support Program (CSP) provided the cooperative with five rotary cultivators with trailers, nine mechanical pruning shears, six mechanical olive harvesters, and other needed harvesting material. During the 2022 agricultural season, 40 farmers benefitted from the olive harvesting equipment, while another 50 benefitted from the rotary tillers and trailers saving them around $14 per day and $5 per hour of use respectively. To complement this assistance, CSP is providing a prefabricated room for the equipment’s safe storage and management of the equipment as a public service available to all farmers. The installation of the prefabricated room will be completed in February 2023. This USAID assistance is helping improve the livelihoods of an estimated 119 local farmers in the Jezzine district by enhancing their access to affordable farming equipment and reducing their production costs.

“The prefabricated room will help the cooperative safeguard all the equipment in one location, easily accessible to all farmers,” stated Charbel Khawand, Head of Saidoun cooperative.