Lebanon water crisis fuels cholera outbreak: ‘Things are coming to a head’

Lebanon water crisis fuels cholera outbreak: ‘Things are coming to a head’

The Litani river winds its way through the open plains of the Bekaa Valley, Lebanon’s agricultural heartland. For centuries, farmers there relied on it to irrigate their crops.

But in recent years, the river has become a dumping ground for an unfettered flow of raw sewage, industrial waste and chemical fertilisers. Grey and fetid, it emits a pungent smell that wafts over nearby farms and envelops the refugee camps that dot the river banks.

“The Litani is worse than a sewer,” said Firas Aboud, a 28-year-old Syrian farmhand who lives in one of the informal camps near the city of Zahle. “I wouldn’t let my worst enemy wash in it.”

But with Lebanon’s fragile water systems increasingly unreliable, some people are forced to use the river for their household needs and to irrigate their crops. The absence of affordable clean water is one factor behind a recent cholera outbreak, the first since the disease was eradicated in Lebanon more than three decades ago and a sign of the widening implications of thecountry’s compounding economic and financial crises.

Experts have been warning for years of a looming water catastrophe, the result of chronic under-investment in infrastructure, bad management of existing resources and climate change.

“Unfortunately, it