Over the past five millennia, Gaza City’s historically important old town and port have been repeatedly occupied, besieged, destroyed and rebuilt. Today, as a result of the war on Gaza and its 2.3 million residents, most of Gaza’s infrastructure is destroyed while land and water are severely polluted. Food is used as a weapon of war and most Gazans are on the brink of starvation. At the time of writing, over 42,000 people are confirmed dead, with many more thousands buried under the rubble. The living, many with violently acquired injuries, are left traumatised. It is uncertain how Gaza will look in the future.
Nonetheless – or perhaps because of this – we wish to celebrate Gaza’s rich food culture and the ongoing work of producers to care and provide. Destruction and war neither annihilate us nor obliterate our learning. The history and resilience of Palestinians in Gaza provides some hope that a dignified agroecological future is still possible.
Land, people and their food cultures under assault
Traditional farming played a pivotal role in the historical struggle to protect the land and in Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler occupation
Gaza’s traditional food and farming system is known as ‘baladi’. Cherished for the quality and nutritional value of its ingredients and products, baladi foods embody the region’s cultural heritage and hospitality. Peasant farmers, or ’ fellaheen’, and their ‘baladi’ farming systems have played a pivotal role in the historical struggle to protect the land, which has been crucial for Palestinian resistance to Israeli settler occupation.
Over generations, local varieties of olive, date palm, citrus and grape have been adapted to cope with the sandy, saline conditions along the coast. The heavier clay-based soils in the east hold enough moisture and fertility to support rain-fed agriculture, and historically supported mixed cropping with baladi grains, fruit and nut trees, and sheep.
Due to the forced displacement of mainly farming families from historical Palestine in 1947-9 and again in 1967, Gaza’s population mushroomed. Before the 2023/4 aggression, 74% of Gazans were already refugees. Most were landless: renting land or producing on rooftops in Gaza’s eight densely populated refugee camps. Since the census of 2017, no land in Gaza has been zoned as rural, with farming taking place in and around cities, increasingly squeezed between urban expansion and the annexation of its border lands by Israel. Nonetheless, a quarter of the population derived their livelihoods from small-scale family farming, and three quarters of these farmers were women.
Since 2007, Gaza’s concentrated population has lived under an illegal blockade, with security walls and fences restricting the incoming and outgoing movement of people and goods, including food and farming inputs. Access to the most fertile land along Gaza’s borders was restricted by an Israeli no-go zone, placing a shocking 1/3 of total farmlands off limits. This zone was ‘manned’ by remote-controlled machine guns, ground sensors, and drones deployed along the 60-kilometre border. Those who strayed too close were often shot and their equipment confiscated or destroyed. Nonetheless, in a high-risk act of resistance, farmers continued to plant baladi crops such as wheat, barley, lentils and vegetables on their land. Similarly, artisanal fishers were restricted by Israel to under 12 nautical miles (85% less than the UN allocated fishery) off the shore, putting the most productive fishing grounds beyond reach. Biannual herbicide spraying by Israel over Gaza, allegedly for security purposes, damaged hundreds of acres of crops, and regular incursions with bulldozers destroyed many more acres of farmland and compacted fragile soils.
Even before the current genocide, farmlands were already littered with the psychological and toxic legacy of explosives. For decades, airstrikes and ground invasions have deliberately and repeatedly targeted food and water infrastructure. Following the 22-day invasion starting in December 2008, the UN documented wide-scale damage to fields, vegetable crops, orchards, livestock, wells, hatcheries, beehives, greenhouses and irrigation systems.
This pattern intensified after 7 October 2023, with the destruction of markets, bakeries and Gaza’s last remaining flour mill. As of May 2024, 49% of farmland had been destroyed, including nearly 50% of fruit trees intentionally ripped out; approximately 70% of Gaza’s greenhouses partially or completely destroyed; and once-productive farmland heavily compacted by tanks and bulldozers – littered with bomb craters, heavy metals and unexploded ordinance that could take 14 years to clear.
Struggles for food autonomy
Remarkably, despite regular bombardments and incursions over the decades, Gaza managed in some years to be self-sufficient in fruits and vegetables. Yet, neoliberalism and settler colonialism have been aligned in promoting industrial agriculture and eradicating traditional agricultural values, leading to the separation of Palestinians from their land. And attempts to reduce dependence on aid and Israeli imports of food, as well as water and energy, came at a cost to human and environmental health.
Neoliberalism and settler colonialism have been cynically aligned in the separation of Palestinians from their land.
To bolster autonomous food ‘security’ on limited land, intensive production methods were prioritised by Gaza’s authorities, agronomists and NGOs alike. This quest for modernity demanded the importation of agricultural inputs, mostly from Israel due to its control over Gaza’s boarders and trade. In 2022, the Gaza Strip imported 4.6 million litres of synthetic fertiliser, over a million litres of herbicides and pesticides, and hundreds of thousands of tons of feeds and input-dependent hybrid seeds from Israel. In 2022, the Occupied Palestinian Territory was Israel’s third largest export market – a captive market worth US$4.6 billion to Israel.
In this scenario, production costs in Gaza increased as farmers invested in imported inputs and technologies, making their produce more expensive than highly subsidised industrial imports from Israel, sold into Gaza at just below the cost of local production. High-yielding hybrid varieties, often monocropped in polytunnels by Gaza’s commercial producers, flooded local markets, threatening baladi varieties. Even though embattled family farmers strived to defend baladi food and farming systems in the face of increasing industrialisation, the intensive use of agrichemicals depleted the soil life, and nitrate leaching also led to groundwater pollution -damaging the very life support systems that Gazans depended upon and will need again for their future survival and dignity.
The combination of climate change, and blockade-induced economic hardship and associated market conditions, added to regular military destruction, have contributed to indebtedness across the sector, exposing farmers and their land to the forces of land speculation and elite accumulation from within, further entrenching the separation of Palestinians from their land.
The interrupted road to an urban agroecology
For three years, until October 2023, we were part of a team of NGOs and universities from Gaza and the UK doing research together on Gaza’s foodways. Our aim was to support a shift away from Palestine’s dependent, industrialised agriculture and towards an alternative based on agroecology for food sovereignty at the urban and territorial level. Initially in Gaza City and Khan Yunis, our objective was to strengthen women-led urban agroecology research, practice and policy formulation and the advancement of women’s political participation in food system planning, organising and resourcing.
Building networks for mutual learning and policy development was central to this work. In 2019, the Urban Women Agripreneurs Forum (UWAF) was established by the Gaza Urban and Peri-urban Agriculture Platform (GUPAP): a 300-strong, women-only space consisting of five self-organised forums of producers and processors spanning the Gaza Strip.
In response to market obstacles for small-scale producers and processors, in 2023 UWAF, with GUPAP, lobbied for the formal registration of baladi products, and launched its Community-led Solidarity Marketing initiative, collecting and distributing 18 tons of fresh and processed foods from 50 UWAF members to around 2,000 vulnerable families in Gaza.
In addition to practice-based farmer-to-farmer learning requested by members, within just days of the onslaught on Gaza, our first Arabic language professional diploma in Urban Agroecology & Food Sovereignty, hosted by the University College of Applied Sciences (UCAS), was due to welcome 30 students to become the thinkers, planners, farmers and movement builders of the future. This and other emerging initiatives were made impossible by the Israeli invasion after October 7th 2023.
But despite the destruction of lives, land and nature over the past agonising months, important fragments of this work remain. While dispersed in makeshift shelters, exposed to ongoing attacks and the daily indignities of searching for food and water, remarkably, many of the UWAF members continue to organise – collecting data, producing food and setting up community kitchens. In June 2024, the women came together to produce the sweets traditionally eaten to celebrate Eid al Adha as a symbol of their steadfast commitment to their community and its cultural foodways.
20 product label statements for women-led products were issued in 2023 with fees waived, opening markets for foods processed by women
In the absence of any formal agricultural support or extension provision and of the now blocked food aid that once dominated, some of the women who are graduates in farming and food studies have decided to take farm and food recovery into their own hands too, establishing a community-led farming advisory service to support others in recovering their food and farming enterprises.
Most of us can only watch these unspeakable horrors, as well as the many acts of solidarity and bravery, from afar: supporting these women with cash payments to continue their work, and realigning our contributions to their long task of recovery and healing. The diploma is being resurrected in response to an expressed desire by students to continue learning and to transform and rebuild their future. And plans to reconstruct Gaza’s only baladi seed bank in Al Qarara are already underway, while people are working to get these seeds into the hands of more growers.
Today, it is baladi seed – saved and adapted over generations – that is traded, and the skills to grow this seed are highly valued. A new ‘commons’ currency, these seeds are carried throughout repeated displacement, and planted next to temporary shelters, in damaged greenhouses or on reclaimed land. This is a manifestation of the people of Gaza’s collective care and steadfastness, and a statement of their resourcefulness, resistance and solidarity.
Contending ‘day after’ visions
As we inevitably gaze past the end of the war, two distinct, and we argue incompatible, visions are emerging for the future of food and farming in Gaza. The first, framed around climate-smart agriculture and artificial intelligence, is a technology and input-intensive, extractive, vertical and people-less food future dependent on global capital. The forces of colonisation, neoliberalism and colonial modernity have long conspired to transform Gaza’s food system by eroding its foodways and enforcing complete dependency. This recent turn serves to highlight the investment opportunities that Gaza’s destruction and reconstruction represents – transforming traditional foodways once and for all. One practical concern for us, related to this vision, is the viability of increasing dependence on imported and proprietary inputs whose entry can be refused or, as we have seen, cut off or destroyed as an act of war by Israel. Another concern is the concentration of power over the food system in the hands of international capital that connects agribusiness, biotech and the military industrial complex.
The other vision, one of agroecology based on baladi foodways, is diversified, place-based and people-centred with a commitment to a just recovery underpinned by principles of equity and sovereignty. It seeks to draw upon Gaza’s own knowledge-intensive, highly adaptive, and richly interconnected foodways to heal relationships with the land. In contrast to the vision of industrial agriculture with its input-intensive monocultures, to achieve food sovereignty, there is a need to diversify through locally adapted polycultures. This requires enhancing soil fertility through nutrient cycling of Gaza’s organic wastes, substituting synthetic fertilisers and pesticides with natural and locally-available alternatives, and reversing input dependence, rather than accelerating it. Importantly, there is a need for social and political transformation focused on improving ecological and human health and addressing issues of equity and participation in food systems governance, empowering farmers, particularly women, to exert agency over their production systems and ensure sustainable livelihoods.
At the time of writing, the war continues to wreak havoc on Gaza’s entire food system as well as its social fabric. It is not clear which of these two visions Gaza will choose (or even if this is within their gift). Emerging from this crisis, Gaza’s demographics will have been changed forever. Women will carry the burden as breadwinners and carers for those with violently acquired injuries. A radical re-imagining is required to centre their knowledges, skills and needs and to honour their solidarity and steadfastness as they recover Gaza’s foodways.
Authors: Georgina McAllister is with the Centre for Agroecology, Water & Resilience (CAWR) at Coventry University (UK), Ahmed Sourani and Muhammed Zimmo work with the Gaza Urban & Peri-urban Agriculture Platform (GUPAP), and Chiara Tornaghi is also with CAWR. Together with the Urban Women Agripreneurs Forum (UWAF), the Palestinian Hydrology Group (PHG), and the University College of Applied Sciences (UCAS) in Gaza they are supported by Canada’s agency IDRC to work together on a research project called Gaza Foodways. Contact: George McAllister: ad3054@coventry.ac.uk
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This article is part of Issue 1-2024: Policies for Agroecology
