SANAA, Nov.18 (Saba) –Increased fighting along the Western Coast which is effectively limiting the flow of life-saving commodities, including food staples, into Al Hudaydah Port is aggravating an already terrible humanitarian situation in Yemen, the inhumanity of using the economy or food as a means to wage war is unacceptable and is against international humanitarian law.
Over much of the first year of the war Western news media had little coverage of the conflict. This was not just the result of a political editorial decision, journalists could not enter Yemen easily since the Saudi aggression controlled all flights and passengers to Sana’a airport, few Western journalists had links with Yemeni journalists who, along with Yemeni rights organizations, worked to document the strikes.
The data reveal that agricultural land was the target most frequently hit in every governorate save Shabwa and al Mahwait (where the road to Sana’a was the main target). According to FAOSTAT in Yemen agriculture covers just under 3% of the land, forests 1%, and pastures roughly 42%. In short to target agriculture requires a certain aim.
Placing the rural damage alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas, we find strong evidence that aggression strategy has aimed to destroy food production in the areas which the Ansar Allah(Houthis) and the General People’s Congress (GPC) control.
Wars, and above all this war, are forms of experimentation, damaging agriculture and controlling food imports have long formed part of the arsenal of techniques employed against the much smaller territory of Gaza, here the experiment is on a larger scale with many different parties engaged in the fray, today the war appears to have entered a third phase with a Coalition attempt to take the coastal plain with its ports and to use control of the banks and government salaries to bring the north economically to its knees, an official of the MAI responded negatively when asked recently whether the Ministry had continued to log damage to agricultural infrastructure beyond August 2016, responding that ‘all has already been.
In a longer-term perspective, it appears that this war, prosecuted by countries in which oil, armament, and the dollar loom so large, aims at a further devaluation of Yemen’s rural human and animal labor beyond that already brought about by the oil.
Yemen’s food production sector since the 1970sIf today the food crisis/looming famine in Yemen is considered the worst in the world, this is not solely the result of the war. In 2012 the World Food Program (WFP) stated that “ten million Yemenis, nearly half of the population, were food insecure.” 2 Food insecurity was described as primarily a rural problem.
Concerning 37% of the rural population.3 From the end of 2011, Oxfam and the WFP were calling for the supply of emergency food aid to upwards of one quarter of the population.4 In the wake of the economy’s shrinking by 11% in 2011, the overall agricultural sector had been particularly affected by the shutting down of basic supplies and the shortage of inputs – with an estimated drop in output of 16%. Clearly there is no indigenous short-term solution to food insecurity in Yemen in sight: food aid is required, but it is telling that the food aid will be, in the WFP’s packages, 100% wheat grain in a country where sorghum, millet and barley were, until the 1970s, the staple grains, wheat being used for special dishes.
The scale of the 2011 protests in Yemen should not be forgotten: Marieke Transfeld has argued that they were in absolute terms the largest in the Arab World.5 Whether that is true or not, with people marching on foot from Taiz and al-Hudaida to Sanaa the protests sought to unify the city and the countryside symbolically in a manner seen in no other Arab state.
The importance of Yemen’s rural society: first, Yemen’s population remained into the second half of the twentieth century a very rural one: some 85% of the population lived in small villages (or tents) throughout the country as late as the 1970s. Second, as a mountainous country with irregular and at times torrential summer rainfall, the production of people and food over the centuries meant human (and animal) work to make the land that rendered life possible. 7 Yemen’s sculpted landscape makes a mockery of the notion of ‘the conquest of nature’. 8 And it invites reflection on the absurdity of imposing international ‘market value’ on Yemeni agriculture in abstraction from this elementary reality. In the rural sector of Yemen the very land of Yemen is at stake.
The focus of investment was on irrigated agriculture. The 1970s and 1980s saw the development of unprecedented and unregulated private and public investments in well-drilling that served to irrigate flat and mechanizable lands on both coastal lowlands and the dry upper plateaux of the country below terraced escarpments. Investment in groundwater-dependant irrigated agriculture on the plateaux and the coastal plains has resulted in overexploitation and depletion of the aquifers, challenging the very underpinnings of this intensive agricultural economy and even the future of cities such as Sanaa, the capital.
The major coastal spate-irrigated wadis saw international development agencies led by the World Bank, offer contracts to international companies for building expensive diversion structures with imported technology in the upper reaches of the flood plain of the wadis.
The consensus of informed opinion is that over the longer haul, the expansion of cash-cropping has increasingly benefited only a minority of internationally networked wealthy farmers, politicians and businessmen.
Yemen imports more than 75 percent of the cereals it consumes whereas in 1970 the figure was 18 percent.23 In 2009 of the cereals grown in Yemen, 55% by weight, 60% by area sown in cereals, was sorghum; sorghum together with barley and millet formed 69% of cereal production by weight, 80% by area.24 But in the same year wheat formed 74% of the cereal components of the Yemeni diet.25 By 2011, 93% of national wheat requirements were imported.
This situation was not unpleasing to former President Ali Abdullah Saleh whose close relatives controlled the major importing and distributing company, the Yemen Economic Corporation (YECO).
The rapid disconnection of social reproduction from local food production, taking place simultaneously with a paucity of public health provision (half of the Yemeni population had no easy access to health services before the war.)
First is the poor coverage of the war by Western media, reflecting not only the difficulty of access for journalists but above all the silence of international organizations concerning targeting and damage assessment.
Written by Mona Zaid
Saba