Wheat in Crisis: Variability of Wheat Area in Lebanon 2017–2025

Wheat is a vital staple crop worldwide. However, its production has been increasingly challenged in Lebanon in recent years by multi-factorial crises intersecting socio-economic, political, security, and climate factors. This study provides the first national, multi-year monitoring of wheat area in Lebanon (2017–2025), linking satellite observations with crisis impacts. We conducted a multi-temporal supervised classification across the 2017–2018 to 2024–2025 seasons, using Google Earth Engine, Sentinel-2 imagery, and Random Forest classifier, achieving an 87% overall accuracy. We then estimated wheat area based on a random stratified sample. Interannual changes were related to major crises and input-price dynamics. Wheat area increased during 2019–2021 but dropped sharply in 2021–2022 as subsidies weakened and input costs surged. Indeed, during the transition toward economy dollarization, production costs in USD peaked in 2021–2022 and then eased consistently with the 2022–2023 area rebound. In 2023–2025, the crop area decreased again dramatically (−34% in 2023–2024 and −38% in 2024–2025) due to the conflict with Israel and associated widespread displacement that likely constrained field access and reduced sowing, particularly in southern Lebanon. Ultimately, our findings highlight the critical need for ground-truth data for accurate area estimation, alongside yield and socio-economic metrics to better understand interannual wheat area variability.