Agriculture in Lebanon is often narrated as a process of steady decline since the 1970s: the ‘disappearance’ of the Lebanese smallholder peasant, the withdrawal or failure of the state, and the agricultural sector’s diminishing role within the national economy. The history and ongoing presence of Syrian farmworkers in the Lebanese countryside sits ambiguously within this national narrative: exploitable, flexible, and largely invisible, yet vital to Lebanon’s food system. These tensions were brought further to light as countless numbers of these formerly seasonal workers became refugees throughout the Syrian conflict. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research among Syrian and Lebanese agriculturalists in Lebanon’s Biqa’ Valley from 2018 to 2019, this paper radically reframes the nationalist account of Lebanon’s agricultural “decline” from a feminist agrarian political economy perspective. It recasts Lebanon’s agrarian question as a regional and global predicament rooted in a decades-long crisis of rural reproduction across borders. Based on oral history data, the paper traces how a segment of upwardly mobile Syrian migrants (shawish) established a network of camps in Lebanon for an increasingly feminized population of eastern Syrian farmworkers, as rural families became dependent on remittances from abroad, particularly as Syria’s economy liberalized throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. In tandem, it charts how many Lebanese smallholders were pushed out of agriculture by the threat of indebtedness from the 1970s onward. In their wake remained a narrowing class of Lebanese contract farmers (daman) who pay rent to landlords, take on the risks of production and marketing, and hire Syrian farmworkers through camps run by shawish. Yet because of their gendered connection to reproductive labor, these fraught agrarian histories of displacement, debt, and class antagonism were treated as marginal to the “official” history of agriculture within Biqa’ residents’ vernacular narratives about the past. More often, these histories were expressed in the homely details of everyday life – in Syrian women’s practices of gleaning and food preservation, for example — and in everyday struggles over what counts as “women’s work” and how that work was remunerated, if at all. By focusing on these local predicaments in light of their global determinations, the paper makes a case for understanding Lebanon’s agrarian question beyond the nationalist frame: as a historically layered process by which agriculturalists on both sides of the Lebanese-Syrian border have grappled with the dislocating and distinctly gendered effects of debt and labor precarization for decades.