Beirut - 17 February 2025

Lebanon's legislative picture is complete: a law to regulate seeds, seedlings, and propagation material, the aquatic fishing law, the State Budget Law, and the amendments to the Labor Law. These files are not technical. They are a battlefield over sovereignty and rights.

In the past couple of months, we stood against these draft laws for a clear reason. The “reforms” being proposed are devoid of justice. They shift the burden onto society, especially those already struggling to make ends meet, while legalizing privilege and selectivity and protecting powerful interests through legal text:

• The Seeds Law narrows the space for local seeds and facilitates market concentration, undermining food sovereignty and making producers more dependent on closed, controlled supply chains.
• The Aquatic Fishing framework risks turning a public right into licenses, exemptions, and selective enforcement, weakening the public domain and normalizing control over it.
• The State Budget Law leans toward extracting revenue from people’s pockets instead of confronting tax evasion and special advantages, reproducing the same cycle of financing corruption.
• The Labor Law empties guarantees from their content, pressures wages, and weakens the right to organize under the slogans of “flexibility” and “rescue,” as if society must be broken to save the system.

This is the common thread: people pay more, rights shrink, and sovereignty weakens. The weakest segments of society are made to pay the price for the financial crimes of a small minority. The “stability” being offered is one that protects the system, not the people.

Real stability has a name: justice, fair taxation, breaking monopolistic gains, protecting wages and public services, and restoring public stewardship over land and sea.

On Monday, the government’s decision to raise the VAT makes one thing unmistakably clear. Treating each file in isolation is leading us to a dead end. These laws are connected by design, and they must be confronted in the same manner: through a unified political position that defends people's rights, restores sovereignty, and refuses to let society pay the price of institutionalized plunder.

When we submitted our comments to H.E. the Lebanese Ministry of Agriculture, Dr. Nizar Hani, on the fishing legislation and the regulation of the seed trade, We made one point clear. A purely technical approach flattens the issue and excludes democratic citizens' participation in decision-making. It treats these laws as administrative “updates,” while they are, in fact, political choices that reshape sovereignty, public rights, and who holds power in the economy.