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.
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| 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”.
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| 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.
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| 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.
