“The alarm on Ahmed Karim Khalife’s phone is set for 6am, so the 22-year-old budding architect can join the queue that starts forming early outside his neighbourhood bakery in Beirut. The shop opens at about 7:30am, and nowadays, often runs out of bread by 9am, said Khalife. ... Lebanon’s grinding economic crisis has driven inflation up over the past three years, and the giant explosion at Beirut’s port in 2020 destroyed the country’s biggest grain silos, hobbling its ability to store wheat. Now, Russia’s unrelenting blockade of the Black Sea amid the war in Ukraine – where Lebanon imports more than 60 percent of its wheat – is deepening the Middle Eastern nation’s food crisis, upending the lives of families like Khalife’s. ...”
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