Abu Rida gestured proudly through the tinted windows of his battered and dusty, silver Hummer SUV at a field of shoulder-high cannabis plants. “This is the famous Red Lebanese,” he said, pausing briefly to lean out of the window and pick the soft fluffy head of one plant. The pungent odour filled the car.

Abu Rida - not his real name - is one of the leading drug barons in the Bekaa Valley, earning millions of dollars each year from hashish cultivation and from refining and selling cocaine.

This year, Lebanon's hashish farmers are enjoying an uninterrupted harvest after the authorities chose not to confront the powerful clans of the Bekaa Valley by attempting to destroy their crops. Tackling the heavily armed farmers, some of whom employ their own private militias, was one problem too many for a Government struggling with numerous political and security crises. That has allowed vast tracts of the usually barren plains of the northern Bekaa to turn green this year with fields of saw-toothed Cannabis sativa plants.

Abu Rida and his clan are free to press on with their harvest. Over 6ft (1.83m) tall and powerfully built, the ponytailed 37-year-old is protected by bodyguards, some of them drawn from his home village, others on the run from the law.

Early in the morning, as the sun inched over the mountains to the east, a bleary-eyed bodyguard shuffled out of the ground-floor dormitory of Abu Rida's house carrying a small pot of steaming black coffee. The bodyguard was followed by Abu Ahmad, a cocaine addict whose limbs jerked spasmodically as he hunted for a packet of cigarettes.

“I want to go back to America,” grumbled Abu Ahmad. “Cocaine is too expensive around here. It's much cheaper in Miami.”

The bodyguard poured cups of coffee for the guests, ignoring the faint staccato thud of heavy machinegun fire in the wooded hills to the west, where militants from the Shia Hezbollah in Lebanon had begun another training session.

Abu Rida was still sleeping upstairs. He and his men had spent the previous night shooting up a house with machineguns and rocketpropelled grenades in Baalbek, the largest town in the northern Bekaa. The house belonged to a building contractor who, they said, had fled with $140,000 (£81,000) of Abu Rida's money.

The gunfire had attracted the attention of local Hezbollah men, but when they saw that Abu Rida was responsible for the shooting they left him alone.

The sun had climbed high into the sky by the time Abu Rida joined his bodyguards for coffee in the courtyard of his fortified home. He planned to begin the hashish harvest in the afternoon, but until then there were more pressing matters that required his attention.

One of his seven brothers is in prison in the United States, apparently for conspiring to smuggle heroin, and Abu Rida needed to find a lawyer for him. Then it transpired that the brother of the building contractor whose home he shot up was a mid-ranking Hezbollah official. The Hezbollah man called Abu Rida repeatedly on his mobile phone during the morning to mediate an amicable solution that would prevent blood being spilled.

“He's telling me I will get the money back - just don't kill his brother,” Abu Rida said with a chuckle.

The Lebanese state has little authority in the northern Bekaa, where tribal law and clan loyalties are paramount. Even the powerful Hezbollah chooses to turn a blind eye to the criminal activities in its Bekaa stronghold rather than risk the enmity of the tribes.

For all his bluster, Abu Rida is a shrewd businessman. He plans to undercut his rival hashish farmers this year by selling the freshly harvested crop for $350 a kantar - roughly 100lb - instead of the usual $500. “I'm the largest farmer in the area, so the dealers come to me first and I set the price,” he said.

Those who will lose out are the medium-scale hashish growers who have spent money irrigating their crops, rather than the smaller farmers who cannot afford that expense. The scarcity of water in the arid northern Bekaa and the rising cost of diesel for pumping water out of wells has cut into the farmers' profits this year, and tighter security along Lebanon's borders means that most cannabis is sold domestically these days, for about $1,000 a kilogram, rather than being smuggled abroad.

“I would make more money from growing barley, but it's too expensive to irrigate,” Abu Rida said.

Cocaine dealing is a more lucrative activity, however, and one that Abu Rida does not care to discuss in detail. He reached inside a steel safe beside his armchair and took out a black plastic bag filled with about 2kg of white powder. He placed it inside a briefcase and handed it to a waiting bodyguard.

“I want $25,000. OK?” he told the bodyguard.

In the afternoon, Abu Rida inspected the beginning of the harvest. A group of Syrian labourers gradually scythed through a field of plants, with the harvested crop being piled up in rows to dry in the sun. A bodyguard with an AK47 rifle slung around his neck smoked a joint and kept watch over the labourers.

A beaten-up Mercedes driven by a local hashish dealer came along the dirt track and stopped beside Abu Rida. The word was spreading quickly among the buyers that Abu Rida had begun his harvest and there was business to be done.

Growing habit

2% of the world’s cannabis resin comes from Lebanon and Egypt

16,000 acres used for illicit cultivation in and around the Bekka Valley last year

2% of last year’s Lebanese hashish crop was effectively eradicated

£15 wholesale price of a kilogram of cannabis resin in Lebanon

6.4% of the Lebanese population between the ages of 15 and 64 uses cannabis

Sources: UN World Drug Report, 2008

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