Lebanon’s economic meltdown was brought on when the government defaulted on its debt and the currency collapsed in 2019. It triggered months of protests demanding political reforms and accountability from sectarian elites – protests dubbed a “revolution” by the thousands who took to the streets.

Yet assumptions on the street that the economic collapse would jolt the ruling elites into action proved not to be true, says David Wood, an International Crisis Group analyst. “The calculation has been made,” he says. “Lebanon’s elites have decided that … it actually serves their narrow self-interest to do nothing.”

Despite the lack of reform, the crisis has significantly expanded one area of government that appears to be working: the provision of cash assistance, administered via two social welfare programs.

The United Nations World Food Program estimates that it supports one-third of all the people in the country, working largely through those government structures. Despite that support, a quarter of all those living in Lebanon are deemed “food insecure.”

Zuhair, a shoemaker, is embarrassed to give his name or be photographed. His profound poverty is obvious in his own shoes, tattered beyond repair. “I can’t even afford to buy shoes,” he says. “We are barely surviving. We don’t see a chicken; meat is off the menu.”

Zuhair looks despondently down at his feet, where the shoemaker’s profound poverty is obvious in his own shoes, tattered beyond repair, which he wears without socks.

“I can’t even afford to buy shoes,” he says. “We are barely surviving. We don’t see a chicken; meat is off the menu.”

Zuhair, who has big hands, a mishmash of teeth, and thick veins protruding from overly thin arms, refuses to be photographed or to give his full name. He expresses shame at how dramatically his life has been degraded by the economic collapse that began in October 2019, in Lebanon – a nation once trumpeted as the Switzerland of the Middle East.

Lebanon’s economic meltdown, brought on when the government defaulted on its foreign debt and the currency collapsed, triggered months of protests demanding deep political reforms and accountability from corrupt sectarian elites. Dubbed a “revolution” by the thousands of those who took to the streets, it resulted in little positive change.

The financial crisis was deemed so severe that the World Bank, in spring 2021, said Lebanon could be among the top three “most severe crisis episodes globally” since the mid-19th century.

The Lebanese people have been the subject of dire predictions of malnourished destitution. The impact of their country’s economic collapse has been compounded by a perfect storm of the pandemic, the massive 2020 ammonium nitrate explosion in the Port of Beirut that caused billions in damage, chronic political deadlock, and a ruling elite that analysts say has settled into a strategy of “doing nothing.”