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Advancing Research, Enabling Communities: American University of Beirut Outreach from the Beqaa Valley
The Agricultural Research and Educational Center (AREC) offers experiential learning programs mainly in Agriculture, Landscape Design and Eco-Management. AREC is also a research center, where faculty members explore ways of improving natural and human well-being and collaborate to enable communities in the Beqaa Valley of Lebanon and beyond, to improve the sustainability of their livelihoods.
The American University of Beirut (AUB), a private institution of higher learning founded in Beirut in 1866, has long espoused a mission of social responsibility. From peace time to periods of conflict, AUB students and faculty have reached out through established organizations and clubs, summer work camps, and other voluntary efforts.
The Agricultural Research and Education Center (AREC) is the American University of Beirut’s campus in the Beqaa Valley. Established in 1953 on 100 hectares of land near Baalbek, in the Northern Beqaa area, AREC was initially created for students, faculty and local communities to collaborate in the development of innovative solutions to agricultural problems. Over the years, concern for the broader well-being of rural people led AREC to shift the emphasis of its work to rural community development and especially to the issue of improving rural livelihoods. The region is one of the poorest in Lebanon, and although chronically deficient in water, is considered to be the breadbasket of the country.
AREC’s current mission is embodied in its acronym: Advancing Research, Enabling Communities. Beginning with commitment to service and aspiring to work within a social justice framework, AREC accomplishes its goals through experiential learning, adaptive research and community outreach.
Since its creation in 1953, AREC has facilitated many important achievements in farming and rural development. They include the introduction of modern poultry production to the Middle East, new wheat and barley varieties, organic farming, and a commitment to biodiversity conservation. In recent years, AREC has served as the center for voluntary extensions service in Lebanon through a variety of externally funded projects: Dairy; Forage; ‘Arsal: Sustainable Improvement on Marginal Lands’; Yammouneh: technology transfer to farmers benefiting from the Yammouneh irrigation scheme; and Sustainable Agriculture in the Qaraoun region.
Following Israel’s war on Lebanon in 2006, AUB joined the reconstruction effort to rebuild shattered livelihoods in southern Lebanon. The Land and People relief program adapted a model from public health, the mobile rural development ‘clinic’, providing agricultural and business development advice to rural communities. The management of the Land and People program was recently moved to AREC. While retaining two mobile clinics in the South, the program expanded its services to the Beqaa Valley, where a mobile clinic now covers the farm extension and capacity building needs of farmers’ and women’s cooperatives in the 12 villages surrounding AREC. The programme achieved international recognition. It has featured in the Lebanese, Arab, US Dutch and German media and has won a certificate of appreciation from the United Nations Development Program for its innovative approach.
In 2008, the AUB Faculty of Agriculture and Food Science took the decision to strengthen and deepen its commitment to sustainable rural livelihoods, and, at the same time, to reach out to the entire university to literally become the AUB campus in Beqaa.
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