BEIRUT, Oct. 19 (Xinhua) -- Moving between supermarket shelves in the eastern Lebanese city of Zahle, Joumana Abou Shahla compares prices carefully, weighing similar products to stretch her household budget.
Every item in her basket has become a calculation: what her family needs, what it can afford, and what must wait until another day.
"What matters now is whether I can afford to meet my family's needs with an income that no longer keeps pace with rising expenses," Shahla told Xinhua.
Choosing cheaper products, she said, has become a way to ease the daily burden, a struggle shared by many Lebanese households as rising costs make food, healthcare, and education harder to afford.
Lebanon's consumer price index rose 16.66 percent in August from a year earlier and 1.4 percent from July, according to the Central Administration of Statistics.
For Layla Abou Amer, a woman in her 50s living in Baalbek, eastern Lebanon, the strain is measured by how quickly the family's money runs out.
Her husband's monthly salary of about 600 U.S. dollars is exhausted within the first week of the month, Amer told Xinhua.
The family rations food, buys vegetables and fruit in small quantities, and occasionally borrows from local shops.
Jalal Saleha, who owns a food shop in the town of Bar Elias, said customers increasingly focused on necessities, shopping mainly during the first week of the month.
The strain extends far beyond grocery bills. An assessment, titled "An Enduring Nightmare" and released by the United Nations Children's Fund on Sept. 30, found that four in five households in Lebanon struggled to afford necessities.
Some 22 percent of surveyed households reported that their children had gone to bed hungry during the preceding two weeks, while 31 percent said their children had gone without needed healthcare, mainly because of financial constraints. 46 percent had reduced education spending, while 17 percent said their children had stopped attending school.
Job losses and declining earnings have further eroded families' ability to cope.
A July report by the International Labour Organization, based on a May survey of 2,485 private-sector workers employed in Lebanon before the conflict resumed in March 2026, found that 33 percent of respondents were no longer working. Among those still employed, average labor income had fallen by 14.8 percent. Accounting for both job losses and reduced earnings, average labor income across the surveyed population was estimated to have declined by 40.4 percent.
The impact was particularly severe in conflict-affected southern areas, with unemployment reported among 76.5 percent of surveyed workers from Nabatieh Governorate and 43.2 percent from South Lebanon Governorate.
As winter approaches, transportation, electricity, and heating costs add to the burden.
Samer Ayoub, an employee at a private commercial company earning about 550 dollars a month to support a family of four, told Xinhua that school bus fares had risen by 40 percent from last year, with schoolbooks, stationery, and other necessities also more expensive.
Economy and Trade Minister Amer Bisat attributed price pressures partly to fluctuations in global oil prices and market disorder, saying the ministry was conducting inspections and taking action against violators, while acknowledging that enforcement alone would not resolve the problem.
Lebanon's General Confederation of Labour called on Sept. 21 for an economic state of emergency, urging wage and transportation allowance adjustments and stronger oversight of fuel and food prices.
Meanwhile, the gap between needs and assistance remains stark. According to the Lebanon Response Plan, a unified humanitarian and stabilization framework co-led by the Lebanese government and the UN, over 2.3 million people needed food assistance during the first half of the year, while nearly 350,000 people had received assistance by the end of June.
For families like Shahla's, cheaper food can stretch a limited budget but cannot bridge the widening gap between earnings and essential expenses. The crisis is measured not only by inflation and lost earnings, but also in the quiet arithmetic of everyday survival: what families put in their shopping baskets, what they leave on the shelves, and what their children must do without. ■
