A Local Solution to a Global Crisis - Agroecology for Famine Prevention? The case in Yemen

The greatest humanitarian crisis on Earth is already devastating communities across Yemen. Conflict, disease, drought, locust infestation, and lack of humanitarian access are wreaking havoc for over 80% of the country’s population. As I discussed in my last blog, the decaying SAFER oil tanker threatens a further catastrophe. The situation is incredibly dire, and unless some form of peace agreement can be reached and maintained by the Houthi rebels and Saudi-led coalition belligerent parties, the chance of stabilisation remains slim. By far the most pressing crisis for the Yemeni people is the ongoing catastrophic famine (fully detailed in the 2021 Global Food Crises Report, p252 – 257) that has led to starvation and malnutrition on a scale unseen in recent years.

Conflict, especially the kind of protracted and uneven conflict unfolding across Yemen, undoubtedly exacerbates food security issues and can lead to famine. By 2017, three years into the civil war, Yemen’s agriculture and food system had almost entirely collapsed. In 2018, the United Nations described the situation as “the worst famine in 100 years”, with 13 million people facing starvation. Detailed reporting from the Conflict and Environment Observatory shows over 257,000 hectares of cropland in distress, and details the myriad potential causes of this. Importantly, the report notes that the rise in food security across the country is mostly due to a reduction in livelihood opportunities, with export and trade reduction leading to poverty.

Famine risk areas in Yemen. Source: AFP.

This is interesting because it identifies a key contributing factor to Yemen’s crisis: the economy.

As with any all-encompassing conflict, since 2014 Yemen has transitioned towards a war economy. Corruption is rife, mafia-like systems of protection racketeering have developed, sanctions and embargoes have reduced the government’s capacity to pay its increasingly discontent military, and communities have been forced to adapt their economic activity. Hodeidah port, currently under the control of the Houthi rebels, was responsible for up to 70% of the country’s imports, and as a result of the strangled supply lines humanitarian assistance and basic goods cannot enter.

Subsistence agriculture has been significantly reduced by the degradation of land, and further curtailed by Houthi coercion of small-scale farmers to produce Qat, a narcotic substance chewed by up to 80% of the Yemeni population. The Houthis have drastically increased cultivation of Qat in order to utilise taxes they collect on its sale to fund the war effort and offer the substance to attract potential new recruits. As CEOBs references, another key overlooked factor may be the collapse of the beekeeping industry, as strangled exports and high national prices mean beekeepers cannot sell their honey and have moved to cultivating other subsistence crops, severely limiting the biodiversity of areas that were previously pollinated by bees.

This shift away from food agriculture towards economic monoculture in warzones is a well-documented phenomenon, seen in the shift towards poppy cultivation for the heroin trade in Afghanistan’s protracted war and the militarization of Iraq’s agricultural economy under ISIS to maximise food for fighters and exports to fund war efforts. As fighting continues and belligerent parties require new funds to continue their efforts, agricultural land is often the most easily confiscated and commandeered.

A solution to conflict may ease the burden on agricultural land and allow for the first steps towards recovery for the Yemeni people, but it may be a surprise to learn that the seeds of this crisis were sown long before the outbreak of violence in 2014.

According to Max Ajl, Yemen has long been the most fertile area on the Arabian Peninsula. Pre-1970, agricultural land was predominantly owned by small-scale farmers engaged in smallholder and subsistence level farming. A United Nations assessment of Yemeni agriculture in 1955 determined that Yemen was one the best terraced countries in the world, and various reports from this period hail innovation by Yemeni farmers as some of the most sophisticated agricultural developments globally. Britannica notes that “Yemen’s difficult terrain, limited soil, inconsistent water supply, and large number of microclimates have fostered some of the most highly sophisticated methods of water conservation and seed adaptation found anywhere in the world…”

Local farmers’ intimate knowledge of their land fostered a thriving smallholder agricultural community that were resilient and adaptive to the sometimes-difficult conditions of the Yemeni landscape. Such a skilled agricultural workforce should have fared better than they are currently, even given the apocalyptic conditions of the conflict. This is where the question of the cause of the famine in Yemen becomes complicated. Zaid Basha, a management consultant and expert on Yemen, discusses the deep-rooted causes of the collapse of agriculture in the country in this recent podcast. Smallholder farmers had been edged out of the market by long-term agricultural modernisation programmes starting with the British reforms to increase cotton exports in their protectorate of Aden up to 1967 and continuing through IMF-sponsored economic overhauls to open up the Yemeni economy to the import and export of oil and other commodities in the 1990s. As Ajl notes in his very detailed overview of the Yemeni agricultural sector, the oil boom encouraged increasingly unsustainable farming practices and allowed larger-scale corporate cash crops to be grown on land that was once owned by local farmers.

The impact of this shift to an export-oriented industrial agriculture was to undermine any resilience that had been built up by local farmers over the centuries prior. As an example from the Food and Agriculture Organisation, in the early 1960s, when Yemen’s population was around 5.3 million, the country produced between 700,000 and 760,000 tons of sorghum, a staple cereal crop for the country. By 2014, one year before the start of the war, the quantity had dropped to just 341,000 tons, while the country’s population had risen to 27.2 million. This shift away from locally-produced food in favour of exportable cash crops hollowed out any resilience the agricultural system had, leaving it desperately vulnerable to future threats, such as conflict.

Reliance on one monoculture crop for export both increases the likelihood that a farmer's whole livelihood will be wiped out with one pest infestation or blight, as we’re currently seeing in the desert locust crisis affecting the region, and also damages nutrients in soil, resulting in weaker yields over time as biodiversity declines. This impact of a shift to industrial agriculture has been replicated globally, with the global economy often pointed to as a cause of declining biodiversity and increasingly fragile farming systems. As Ajl notes, in Yemen this trend manifested as smallholder farmers losing land to large corporations and transitioning to wage workers in a cash economy. The impact of the encroachment of the neoliberal global economy into Yemen’s agriculture sector was that smallholder farmers were moved to large-scale corporate farms that produced monocultures for export, and as a result became reliant on imports for survival. Effectively, the devastation of the Soviet Union’s 5-year plans for agricultural collectivism were repeated in the name of large-scale corporate greed.

What was a resilient and diverse portfolio of agricultural crops and methodologies had been hollowed out by the global import-export economy by the time conflict broke out. The conflict exacerbated these issues, but importantly also revealed the fragility of an economic sector hollowed out by large-scale programmes of “modernisation”.

Global Food Security Performance. Source: Statista

But why does any of this matter? Regardless of the causes of the famine, the fact remains that it is ongoing and at the current time the international community is fighting an uphill battle just to get emergency humanitarian aid into the country, let alone address the structural rot in the agricultural system.

It matters because understanding the long-term causes of famine in Yemen, or any crisis-affected state, has implications for humanitarian response and recovery. Resilience is the current buzz word in the humanitarian space, and resilience humanitarianism can be seen as a shift away from pure aid provision and lifesaving action towards a more collaborative response focused on the capacities of the affected population. Often, this manifests as a focus on humanitarian programming built around skills development and training programmes for affected groups or local professionals. Building skills is a key element of building resilience, and a welcome development in humanitarian thinking. However, in many cases, and particularly in the case of agricultural reform, it is very often the case that local populations are already the leading experts in best practice for their land. Indigenous peoples’ farming practices are often the most effective at enhancing food security and supply chain resilience for local communities.

In Yemen, we have seen how the international community devastated the centuries-old agricultural system that had been developed by innovative smallholder farmers over centuries. It is nothing short of hubris to assume the international community can find a better solution than those same farmers to rebuild resilience in the region.

This thinking is captured in the concept of agroecology*. Agroecology examines the relationships between plants, animals, people, and their environment, and incorporates these considerations into farming practices. It is, according to a recent webinar from Re-Alliance, a science, practice, and social movement. It is also a global movement.

Agroecology in Action. Source: Global Agriculture.

As I hope has been made clear here, one of the key underlying causes of Yemen’s current famine is the globally interlinked system of food production and agriculture that favours large-scale monoculture farming for export. This makes communities reliant on one crop or one source of livelihood, and therefore very vulnerable to collapse if conflict or disaster interferes with their supply chains and trade capabilities. A conflict that is already causing death and destruction becomes a conflict that causes death, destruction, and an inability to source basic food, water, shelter, and other goods. But an export-oriented economy is plugged into the global system of trade, so one country or region cannot remove itself from that system without impacting its trade partners.

If we want to improve resilience and support localisation in Yemen, we have to put that into practice wherever we are in order to decouple global economies and the reliance on international food trade.

Agroecology is therefore a global process. A recent report from the Soil Association details how Europe could transition towards a more agroecological model in the next ten years. The benefits to Europeans of a more locally-grown, ecology-focused agricultural system include a reduction in our food footprint, a 40% reduction in agricultural greenhouse gas emissions, increased biodiversity across Europe, and a healthier diet for many Europeans. The impact of climate-smart agricultural policy will be to reduce the massive planetary burden of factory farming, and, importantly, give power back to individual farmers tending land rather than global corporate entities. Large-scale farming has caused ecological devastation in whatever guise it has been tried, from China’s Great Leap Forward to neoliberal corporate collectivisation. Localised farming with shorter supply chains helps to decentralise food production, improving resilience in the system and reducing carbon impact.

Low-intensity farming methods can be maintained even in times of conflict, as demonstrated by the continued agricultural output of ISIS-controlled areas of Iraq and Syria in land controlled by smallholder farmers. Climate-smart agricultural programmes can build resilience, and focus on giving power back to local farmers to grow what they can in the contexts they live, rather than attempting to meet hunger needs through global humanitarian assistance, which consistently falls short. Localising food production in conflict areas has massive benefits, but the same process in peaceful countries can also have a significant positive impact. It won’t necessarily be easy, but it is imperative to support indigenous agriculture globally, and to reduce human impact on the climate.

Conflict inevitably increases food insecurity and damages land, but conflict does not happen in a vacuum. War will always cause destitution and devastation, but the scale of horror we are seeing in Yemen has been exponentially worsened by the global economic system that disenfranchised local workers, hollowed out an economy, and bred grievances that contributed towards the country’s collapse.

If we are able to re-evaluate our relationship to food, imagine a more diversified, less commodified global agricultural system, and take responsibility for our own consumption, we can help to reconstruct the systems of resilience in conflict- and disaster-affected countries. In Yemen, smallholder farmers might just hold the keys to a return to the “once-happy land” of self-reliance and success.

Globally, agroecological farmers are challenging the industrial farming approach. Their success will be for the benefit of us all.

*From Re Alliance: “In short, Agroecology is not merely a set of agricultural practices or one innovation amongst others. It is a paradigm shift in our food systems model that moves us towards diverse knowledge-intensive and ecology-based systems.”

Please read more about agroecology here or here, to understand the process in more detail than could be covered here.

 

Countdown to Environmental Catastrophe - The SAFER Oil Tanker

The floating storage and offloading unit (FSO) SAFER is located approximately 4.8 nautical miles off the coast of Yemen. Built in 1976 and moored off Yemen since 1988 to receive, store, and export oil from the Marib oil fields, SAFER has now become an existential threat to a huge number of Yemeni coastal communities.

Location of FSO SAFER. Source: OpenDemocracy

In 2015, in the early days of the Yemeni civil conflict, Houthi rebels seized control of Hodeidah port as part of their rebellion against President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi’s government. FSO SAFER is moored just outside of Hodeidah, and in an effort to pressure the government to the negotiating table, the rebels began to limit access to the unit and its approximately 1.1 million barrels of oil. The oil onboard SAFER is estimated to be worth in excess of $80 million, making it a powerful bargaining tool for the rebels and a potential source of future income to help fund the war effort should they find a way to extract and sell its contents. However, the rebels have lacked both the resources and skills to continue maintenance on SAFER, and as the war raged on, the decaying vessel slowly became more and more unstable.

Now the United Nations is calling for urgent action to stabilise SAFER and ensure the security of its contents. Should the vessel spring a leak, it risks spilling four times as much oil as the 1989 Exxon Valdez disaster off Alaska. The Exxon Valdez disaster was the worst recorded oil spill in history until the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, but 30 years later pockets of crude oil remain off the Alaskan coast and continue to affect maritime habitats and fishing activities in the area. 1,300 miles of coastline were affected, hundreds of thousands of seabirds, otters, seals, and whales were killed, and the estimated economic cost of the spill was $2.8 billion. It should be noted again here that Exxon Valdez occurred off the coast of Alaska, and so immediate response was possible. Access to a spill site off the coast of Yemen during an ongoing conflict would be significantly more difficult.

And SAFER threatens to spill four times that amount of oil if it is not secured soon.

Yemen is already suffering the world’s worst humanitarian crisis. After six years of war, some 24 million people, or 80% of the country’s population, are in need of humanitarian assistance. The UN Humanitarian Office (UNOCHA) puts the current death toll of the conflict at 233,000, the majority of which have come from indirect causes such as lack of food, health services, and infrastructure. The crisis has been exacerbated by the world’s largest cholera outbreak in epidemiological history, brought on by the failure of water infrastructure as a result of the fighting, massive food shortages as a result of interrupted agriculture due to conflict displacement and a massive locust infestation, and ongoing barriers to humanitarian aid reaching the country. An oil spill of the size SAFER is threatening would be a final nail in the coffin for hundreds of thousands of Yemeni civilians.

Source: Holm Akhdar, Yemeni Environmental Organisation

As SAFER decays, the warring factions in Yemen have resorted to blaming each other for the potential spill, before it has even happened. Many groups, including the Saudi-backed Yemeni government, have stated that the Houthis are withholding access to the tanker deliberately to force the international community to acquiesce to their demands. Houthi groups have responded by saying that the SAFER issue cannot be addressed separately from other peace negotiations. This is to protect one of the only bargaining chips they have to shore up their position in achieving concessions from the Saudi-led coalition they have been fighting against. Given the latest sanctions imposed on the Houthis by the Security Council, maintaining control of the wealth stored aboard SAFER is a major priority for the rebel group.

With both sides digging in and refusing to compromise, many observers are now calling for the UN to take a harder line in negotiating access to the vessel, and even to use force in order to take control of the area surrounding SAFER. An authorised use of force would allow the UN to intervene militarily to secure the tanker and conduct its assessments. But this would require the UN Security Council (UNSC) to invoke Chapter VII of the UN Charter, which allows the UNSC to "determine the existence of any threat to the peace, breach of the peace, or act of aggression" and to take military and nonmilitary action to "restore international peace and security".

The chances of a robust UN intervention without all parties agreeing to the terms are remote. UNSC member states are far from in agreement on how best to proceed with regard to the Yemeni conflict. Several permanent members of the Security Council are heavily involved in the arming and training of belligerents, particularly the UK, USA, and France. Meanwhile, Russia has been working closely with the Saudi-backed Hadi government to facilitate peace talks with the aim of extending its own soft power in the region, and China, rounding out the five permanent members of the UNSC, also finds itself backing the Hadi government. Although this represents a rare case where the five permanent UNSC members are largely aligned in their geopolitical interests in a conflict zone, this does not mean that a resolution on the SAFER container is guaranteed. Since the weight of the international community sits largely behind the Hadi government, the Houthi rebel group are distrusting of UN motives in the region, complicating negotiations and harming the image of neutrality required to secure access.

As with any proxy war, the belligerent sides of the Yemeni conflict have been co-opted by international actors to further their own ends, with the Hadi government receiving widespread international support despite the horrific war crimes being committed by the Saudi-led coalition in its defence, and the Iran-supported Houthi rebels receiving funding and resources from Saudi Arabia’s most significant opponents in the region.

Map of Yemen Conflict Areas as of May 2020. 

In addition to these geopolitical barriers to a robust UNSC response, the threat posed by SAFER is not one the UN is necessarily equipped to respond to. As CEOBS reports: “The UN Security Council has never approved the use of force to directly address an environmental threat, and the chances of all of its permanent members doing so now are remote. While Council resolutions have addressed environmental issues, such as the role of natural resources in fuelling conflict in the DRC, or the role of environmental degradation in the Lake Chad crisis, this would set an entirely new precedent.”

This is a precedent that may yet have to be set.

War and the environment are inextricably linked. Environmental degradation as a result of the changing climate is a major contributing factor to conflict globally, with experts suggesting that climate has influenced up to 20% of armed conflicts in the last century, and that figure is expected to increase dramatically. Though we cannot say that environmental degradation is the cause of conflicts, it is certain that resource competition and displacement due to environmental causes inevitably exacerbate tensions in conflict-prone regions. As the SAFER saga demonstrates, conflict also increases the threat of further environmental damage.

And this is not unique to Yemen. The retreat of ISIS in Iraq has revealed a toxic legacy of pollution and environmental degradation as a result of mismanagement of polluting factories and deliberate sabotage of water supplies. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, decades of war have left the majority of the rural population without access to clean water infrastructure. Conflict of all scales directly and indirectly damages the environment in myriad ways, and once that damage is done it inevitably causes further strife in conflict-affected communities. Environmental degradation forces displacement, and mass demographic changes, poverty, and competition over resources breed further conflict. A disaster of the scale expected should SAFER deteriorate further will inevitably exacerbate the tensions driving the conflict in Yemen, and the people who will suffer the consequences will be those already suffering the most.

The Yemen SAFER oil tanker situation is emblematic of the wider environmental crisis the world faces. As the tanker deteriorates and inches closer to environmental catastrophe, two warring parties fail to reach an agreement on the next steps. Meanwhile, an international community that lacks the teeth to make a meaningful impact fails to coerce or cajole either side to the table. The United Nations calls for sanity and urgent action to prevent a disaster, whilst member states jostle for power and influence over the long-term outcomes of the Yemeni conflict and continue to arm belligerents and provoke tension in the name of geopolitical goals.

This stark situation, the worst environmental threat from an oil tanker the world has seen, threatening the lives of a population living through the worst humanitarian crisis on the planet today, is the clearest example of a global climate in which we all find ourselves.

In 2018, the IPCC announced that globally we had 12 years to take drastic action to prevent catastrophic climate change. As this rather depressing BBC article from 2019 notes, many experts believed that we actually only had 18 months to make significant political commitments to prevent a global warming of over 2 degrees Celsius. 18 months that have now passed. As the world inches towards climate collapse, we still do not have a unified agenda to tackle the greatest threat facing us today. For many, this threat is still an abstract future concern. Other, supposedly more pressing geopolitical and social challenges divert our attention as we clash over COVID-19 vaccine rollouts, rampant nationalist identity politics, and populist political movements sweeping much of the world. The world eyes the rising China as a superpower competitor, whilst Iran takes steps to drag Europe into its war of words and tit-for-tat missile strikes with the US. Britain continues to fumble its way through a messy Brexit as the EU trips up on vaccination across the continent. Political and social upheaval are impacting populations across the globe, and the globe continues to heat up.

The people of Yemen struggle to survive as the warring parties fail to agree on a course of action to stabilise the SAFER oil container. Many fear that a deal will not be reached until it is already too late.

This is a lesson we should learn, and an issue we should act on whilst we still can.

As we squabble and kill over land and riches, a creeping environmental catastrophe looms.