Nearly 10 months after the Oct. 7 attacks and the resulting conflicts on Israel’s southern and northern borders, the Israeli food security organization Leket is keeping its focus on propping up Israel’s hard-hit farmers, but has not yet decided if this will be a permanent element of the food rescue nonprofit’s activities, its founder and chairman told eJewishPhilanthropy.

“Since Oct. 7, almost all our work has been focused on helping farmers,” said Joseph Gitler, who launched Leket Israel in 2003 and continues to play a leading role in the organization alongside CEO Gidi Kroch.

Leket ordinarily focuses on “rescuing” crops and prepared food from industrial kitchens that would otherwise be destroyed or thrown away and distributing it — through some 270 partner organizations — to Israeli families in need. As Israeli farmers have faced a host of challenges since Oct. 7, Leket has instead organized and dispatched over 70,000 volunteers from Israel and abroad to Israeli farms to assist them plant, prune and harvest crops, which are overwhelmingly not being donated but are instead being sold in the market. (In order to continue providing food to Israelis in need, Leket has been purchasing crops from farmers instead of receiving them as donations.)

“So our [food] rescue has dropped dramatically. It’s not that the [amount of] crops our volunteers are picking has dropped — it’s grown dramatically — but we’re not getting those crops. Here and there we are… but we purchased over $10 million worth of crops since Oct. 7 to help farmers and to make up for what’s been lost because we’re not getting as much of the resources,” Gitler said.

According to a new study by Leket and the consulting firm BDO, the first six months of the Gaza war saw the amount of food wasted in the agricultural sector increase to 22%, more than double the 9% of food waste from the same period before the war.

The additional 150,000 tons of wasted agricultural produce cost the economy an estimated $280 million — $185 million in the value of the wasted food, $35 million in the environmental costs attributed to food waste and $60 million in “additional healthcare costs attributable to consuming less healthy food and the resulting harm to citizens’ health,” according to the Leket study.

“This report highlights Israel’s failure on the food security front. Our national resilience was damaged. Since the outbreak of the war, fruit and vegetable prices have risen by about 13%. The food insecurity gap in Israel increased by 8%. Food waste in the agricultural sector rose by 13%,” Chen Herzog, the chief economist of BDO and the editor of the report, wrote in a statement. “While reconstructing the communities around Gaza and in the North, it will not be enough to revert to the previous situation. A new economic reality must be created that enhances agricultural output, addresses labor challenges in the agricultural sector, and creates appropriate incentives to support Israeli agriculture.”

The Hamas terror attacks and ensuing war in Gaza and fighting along Israel’s northern border have had a disproportionate effect on Israel’s agricultural sector. According to Leket, over 30% of the agricultural land in Israel is located on the front lines of the conflicts, with approximately 22% in the Gaza border area and 10% on the northern border. Many of the communities attacked by terrorists on Oct. 7 and many of those still evacuated — in the south and the north — are agricultural communities.

In the attacks, terrorists also deliberately targeted agricultural infrastructure, destroying heavy machinery, irrigation lines and other equipment. Although the Israeli government is meant to compensate farmers for this destroyed property, this generally does not cover the full cost of replacing it.

As a result of the Oct. 7 massacres, in which dozens of foreign workers were murdered, and the lingering threat of further attacks from Gaza and Lebanon, the foreign nationals who often work in Israeli fields have not returned, and the Israeli government has also barred Palestinian laborers from taking their place. According to Leket, since the outbreak of the war, the agricultural sector workforce decreased by approximately 40%, mainly foreign and Palestinian workers.

Many of the forward-operating bases that the Israeli military has established around Gaza and the Lebanese border have been in agricultural fields, limiting farmers’ access to them or rendering them entirely unusable.

All of this has put enormous stress on Israeli farmers, whom Leket has set out to help with its volunteer coordination and by establishing a low- and no-interest loan fund with the nonprofit lender Ogen and a $4 million grant fund with the Israeli food giant Strauss Group. For Israel, supporting Israeli farmers and its domestic crop production is critical for ensuring the country’s overall food security, as foreign exports could be cut off or impeded.

Gitler lamented that its loan and grant funds are insufficient in the face of farmers’ growing needs. “That $4 million fund, when we publicized it to farmers who were eligible, we got $17 million in requests,” he said. “It was really painful to see how much you had to cut people down.”

“What we’ll continue [to do] once things go back to normal, whenever it is, that is going to be a question for Leket: Is Leket an organization that part of what we do is just to help farmers, whether they’re giving us the crops or not,” Gitler said.

In the meantime, Gitler said that the organization was expanding its efforts to assist farmers in northern Israel, having focused primarily on those in southern Israel until now. “We’ve built this [system] for the south, so we’re now launching that in the north,” he said. “I don’t mean the north where we can’t go [because it is too close to the Lebanese border], but the north where the Israeli army is still comfortable with us bringing volunteers.”

Gitler noted that while the stress on farmers has grown, the demand for food among needy Israelis has remained relatively level throughout the war, save for an initial bump in the early days of the conflict. Many of those most directly affected by the war — Israelis evacuated from border communities — have been moved to hotels where they receive meals.

“The problem is that it’s not really hard to be in a hotel and not have a kitchen for nine months,” he said. “So one of the things we did — and it’s still going on — is we set up little mobile fruit and vegetable carts in hotels. If you’re in the Dead Sea, there’s not a lot of supermarkets there, so it’s nice to grab an apple or a banana or take some tomatoes and cucumbers and maybe cut up an Israeli salad in your room. It gives them a little sense of normalcy and [shows them] that someone cares about them.”

Gitler, who started the organization in the midst of the Second Intifada and has led it through wars in Lebanon and Gaza and through the COVID-19 pandemic, reflected on the current moment.

“One thing I have to say: I’ve been here for 23 years, and we just go from crisis to crisis. I thought COVID was crazy, but this is just next level, sadly,” he said. “And it’s not over. So we’re going to continue to push.”