Throughout the war, international policymakers have overemphasized the role of the private sector in addressing Yemen’s severe food crisis, insofar as they have tirelessly insisted since the late 1960s that opening the local market to unrestricted food imports would feed a growing population and drive economic growth. Commercial staple food imports — as well as food assistance — are vital during the war.

Indian Farmer Protests Explained (Interactive)

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However, be that as it may, the role of commercial food importers in postwar, post-neoliberalism Yemen must not be blown out of proportion. Reducing Yemen’s deep agrarian and rural social crisis to wartime and postwar commercial food import issues shows that the root causes of the country’s severe food crisis continue to be gravely misunderstood or deliberately overlooked.

To begin with, Yemen’s absurd, inordinate dependence on staple food imports is but a consequence of . Regrettably, it was a policy that failed to preserve the rural sector’s productivity, let alone stimulating it and accumulating wealth. Rehashing past failed agricultural development policies is evidence of two distributing realities.

The first is Yemeni elites’ lack of capacity to imagine alternative paths of development in Yemen. The second is international policymakers’ position that developed countries  can adopt national agricultural policy frameworks that avowedly control food supply through production and import controls and pricing mechanisms, whereas developing countries cannot do the same to support their agriculture sector.

Inspiration and Lessons

To end this long deadlock between Yemen’s autonomy and global capitalism, perhaps one ought to draw attention to India’s  for inspiration and lessons.

It is not in Yemen’s national interest to continue ignoring its small and marginalized farmers. In a rural society like Yemen, they are the engine of a healthy economy. The vast majority of the population continues to live in rural Yemen. Current official  put Yemen’s rural population at about 70%. This reality limits the role of the private sector in sustaining rural livelihoods. While some might argue that Yemen’s private sector should not be viewed as a monolith, consisting only of large conglomerates, to lump smallholding agriculture and agricultural commercialization together under the umbrella of the private sector is fundamentally flawed.

Small farmers in Yemen are subsistence households, each representing a domestic unit of agricultural production that is economically self-sufficient and combines production and consumption functions. This rural social organization is not the same as one where farmers are reduced to landless, wage earners. Thus, small and marginalized farmers cannot be pigeonholed as private sector actors. Worse is to drop them from the economic equation altogether, especially in so-called developing countries.

Without making this fundamental distinction between smallholding agriculture in Yemen and private sector activity, and without understanding why domestic food production is a matter of national priority to Yemeni citizens, Yemeni elites and international policymakers alike will continue to bungle the task of putting the country on the right path to development.

Food Sovereignty and Security

Many seem to think of Yemen as a big chicken farm that only needs to be fed somehow. They do not understand, or do not want to understand, that at issue is food sovereignty as well as food security. Yemen is a sovereign nation. Yemenis are a people who have the right, needless to say, to choose what to farm, how to farm and how to define the relationship between their local market and the international market. Choosing whether to eat homegrown sorghum or imported wheat is a fundamental national question of utmost importance, not a trade finance problem.

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Private sector activity is not an economic activity that occurs in an empty space; it occurs within social spheres. It impacts domestic production, changes the modes of production within a society and, consequently, remolds all social formations and economic relations. Agrarian changes are . One cannot discuss private sector activity and commercial food imports in isolation from their long-term social impacts. This is lesson number one from five decades of steady economic decline and social regress. It is Yemen’s rural population that has marched down the road to impoverishment and starvation, and they know exactly how — but not why — they got there in the first place. In rural Yemen, lives and land are at stake.

Millions of people in Yemen are famished neither because of the war nor because the private sector is unable to import enough staple foods, in spite of significant and critical wartime challenges. Yemenis are starving because the country has systematically lost its long-standing ability to produce food, particularly staple grains. The magnitude of production losses in Yemen’s agriculture sector has fundamentally limited the economy’s resilience to shocks. Economic  is the ability of the country’s main productive forces to cope, recover and reconstruct. How can you cripple a country’s most tangible, corporeal and immediate branch of production and, at the same time, foster resilience? Speaking of resilience of an incapacitated agriculture sector is a logical fallacy and is, therefore, meaningless and a distraction from the real problem.

Causing Alarm

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (FAOSTAT), Yemen on its domestic soil on average 98% of its grains during 1961-65; namely, sorghum, millet, barley, maize and wheat, in this order. Sorghum production in Yemen peaked at 921,000 tons in 1975. In sharp contrast, the country domestically produced on average only 18% of its total supply of the same grains during 2011-15 and imported the rest. By 2015, the production of  had plummeted to 221,510 tons. To make an already alarming situation unmanageable, the ongoing war more than halved Yemen’s total domestic grain production. Most notably, sorghum production reached a record low of 162,277 tons in 2016, followed by another record low of 155,722 tons in 2018. Yet, some still argue that this decline is due to population growth, not policy.

In a country that primarily produces and consumes sorghum — the traditional staple of man and beast in Yemen — millet and barley, an over 80% dependency on imported wheat is evidently catastrophic during war and peace. This is a well-documented socioeconomic problem. In its 2004  of “The State of Food and Agriculture,” the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) noted that the long-term damaging impact of the loss of domestic food production and exposure to price volatility on individual countries outweigh the plausible short-lived collective benefits: “Lower international prices have moderated the food import bills of developing countries, which, as a group, are now net food importers. However, although lower basic food prices on international markets bring short-term benefits to net food-importing developing countries, lower international prices can also have negative impacts on domestic production in developing countries that might have lingering effects on their food security.”

The heart of the matter is that the agriculture sector is the country’s main productive force. Unchecked private internationally integrated capital has destroyed Yemen’s rural capital and silenced the interests of the country’s sizable rural population. Further, the malintegration of Yemen’s local food market with global markets has jeopardized the country’s economic independence and prevented any real development in Yemen.

The Issue

There is great, non-monetary economic and social value in reclaiming and revalorizing Yemen’s domestic food production and rebuilding its basic rural infrastructure. Domestic food production is too important to Yemenis to be addressed as an afterthought. At issue is not how to procure wheat from international markets, but how to stop the hemorrhage of surpluses out of the agriculture sector.

What serves Yemen’s national interest is to refrain from calling for increasing the country’s dependency on speculative, volatile international food markets; imposing in the guise of development and economic resilience policies that undermine the country’s ability to domestically produce adequate food for local consumption; overstating the benefits of export-oriented agriculture and cash cropping more broadly; and overlooking or downplaying the role of smallholders in generating abundant jobs and sustaining rural infrastructure. In a nutshell, any serious discussion of Yemen’s food security crisis must take into account ecological sustainability, rural livelihoods and both food security and sovereignty in the long term.

Yemeni farmers do not yet fully understand why policymakers and development practitioners insist on promoting imports and more broadly large commercial activity, at a time when the whole world is prioritizing the opposite of these dictates: strengthening self-reliance, planning and regulating limited resources, and minimizing local markets’ exposure. Yemeni struggle has not yet reached the level of political awareness seen in India during its 2020-21 farmers’ protests. To get there, we must understand one point: tying the rural sector’s destiny to large commercial organizations cannot lead to any real growth and prosperity of the entire population.

Indian farmers inspire us to rethink development paradigms in Yemen, for there is more to farming than exporting bananas and onions to Saudi Arabia, and there is more to the role of the private sector in national development than flooding local markets with wheat from Australia, Russia, the United States, France and other international source markets, or even import substitution.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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It is difficult to understand how a country of experienced farmers, extensively terraced areas and fertile agricultural valleys could fail to feed itself. In 1955, a mission of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to Yemen that it was one of the best terraced countries in the world at the time. Indeed, Yemeni farmers are worthy of being described as masters of their particularly harsh environment. The main features of Yemen’s geography and climate are seasonal rains in limited parts of the country and almost no precipitation elsewhere; semidesert coastal plains; western and central steep, rugged highlands of a volcanic mountain massif; and eastern and northeastern arid plateaus and vast deserts, including , literally the “Empty Quarter” — “the largest area of continuous sand in the world.”

What Caused Yemen’s Famine?

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But despite the fragility of the Arabian Peninsula’s environment, including its southwestern corner, the ingenuity of Yemeni farmers’ methods has successfully established innovative and truly sustainable systems of agriculture and food production since time immemorial. As it turns out, what has thrown Yemen into a downward spiral of rural marginalization and impoverishment is an insidious alliance between irresponsible, short-sighted governance and a reckless global food regime, one that is obsessed with the bottom line and market value. Together, as Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo in “The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry,” they worked to “reinforce the incorporation of the peasantry into volatile world markets and extend land alienation, while increasing import dependence.”

Once Yemen was hooked on “speculative world markets dominated by monopoly finance capital,” the rest of the damage was automatic. In fact, that is how free markets work, if that is what you feed into them. Yemen is a good case in point for malintegration with the global economy and the imposition of unequal agricultural trade at the expense of both food security and sovereignty.

Of Donkeys and Farmers

There are two main drivers of Yemen’s persistent and severe food insecurity. Both of them were simultaneously brought about by developmental interventions in the country, particularly in what is commonly referred to as northern Yemen. This part of the country is home to a major water-shed infrastructure spanning two fundamental food-producing systems: the mountain highlands and the lowland Yemeni Tihamah, the Red Sea coastal plain.

The first and foremost driver of insecurity is the large loss of domestic production of native staple grains, including, above all, sorghum. Called dhurrah in Yemen, sorghum is an important traditional staple for humans and livestock. As pointed out by Daniel Varisco in his of agriculture and water rights in Yemen, sorghum is boiled to make Yemeni porridge, aseed, a nutritious popular dish, and ground to make flour for baking traditional bread. Sorghum leaves and stalks are fed to cattle, the bottom part of the stalk is used as fuel for a traditional clay oven, tannur, and the surplus of sorghum fodder and grain is stored for the rest of the year (it is a summer crop, planted in late spring).

This loss is the direct result of the agricultural trade liberalization of the country’s local markets that was indirectly dictated to Yemen. It was done in the name of development, of course, by luring the country into artificially low prices for basic commodities on global markets. In her of Samir Amin’s writing and ideas, Ingrid Harvold Kvangraven underscores that external dictates such as those imposed on Yemen have prioritized the demands of international capital over the long-term needs of the people. She adds that states, capitalists and non-capitalists alike, “need to invest not just in the goods that are the most immediately profitable on the world market or domestically, but in long-term projects that are the most likely to lead to improvements in living standards for people.”

As a consequence, Yemen became absurdly overdependent on basic foodstuff imports, including, notably, wheat and rice, from volatile world markets. In addition to leading to the country’s alarming state of hunger, the loss of domestic production has eventually resulted in a significant decrease in rural sustainability and livelihood. The domestic production figures speak for themselves. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization Corporate Statistical Database (), Yemen produced between 700,000 and 760,000 tons of sorghum during the early 1960s. In 1960, the country’s was 5.3 million. In sharp contrast, by 2014, one year before the start of the war, the quantity dropped to less than half, 341,000 tons, and then to 222,000 and 162,000 tons in 2015 and 2016 respectively.

By that time, the population had grown to an estimated 27.2 million. Meanwhile, the country’s net domestic supply quantity of wheat, for instance, went from an average of 115,222 tons for the period 1961–69 to 3,104,625 tons between 2010 and 2017. Similarly, the average domestic supply quantity of rice went from 20,333 tons to 533,250 tons for the same periods. Given that Yemen does not grow rice and almost entirely imports wheat, these figures portray Yemen’s rapid and costly transformation from food self-sufficiency to striking food insecurity.

Capturing the essence of the collapse of Yemen’s agriculturally self-sufficient economy is the shrewd observation by a professor of political philosophy at the University of Sanaa that donkeys and smallholding agriculturalists in Yemen share the same fate. Originally published in 1988, Abu Bakr al-Saqqaf’s noted that lost donkeys that had been wandering the streets of the cities of Taiz, al-Hodeidah and Sanaa were dying of hunger or being killed by vehicles. Despite being an important agricultural asset, the animals were abandoned because their owners could no longer afford fodder. To deal with this problem, the Yemeni government borrowed money from the United States to supply fodder to local farmers instead of addressing the root cause of the problem.

The fate of the donkeys’ owners was no different. Coerced by the forces of the free market to abandon their agricultural lands altogether, they ended up wandering off en masse all the way to the Gulf, not just to urban Yemen. Previously dignified and accomplished farmers, Yemen’s smallholders and other rural male labor spent the rest of their working lives confined to small rooms they shared with other estranged comrades. Those who were better off lived in pathetic housing conditions in overpopulated and very poor parts of town. As such, Yemen’s peasantry was uprooted from the land, neither by chance nor by circumstances of their own making.

Draining Yemen’s Groundwater

The second driver of Yemen’s destitution is the major shift from longstanding rainfed agriculture to groundwater-dependent irrigated agriculture. It resulted from the introduction of hydraulic pumps powered by diesel in the country’s coastal region and dry plateaus, in addition to building expensive, high-maintenance barrages in the coastal spate-irrigated wadis — Arabic for valleys, watercourses without a permanent flow of water — as by Martha Mundy and several others. These new irrigation methods and permanent diversion structures were perceived by international development agencies as technological improvements.

From their point of view, groundwater mining served to increase water supply for the production of crops that had a high international market value. Thus, in a capitalist economy, they were justified. However, by disregarding the country’s well-known water scarcity, those substantial investments served as a second blow to Yemen’s sustainable agriculture and rural productivity. Over-financed and unregulated, irrigated agriculture has overexploited and depleted Yemen’s deep fossil aquifers. It favored perishable yet lucrative crops destined for local urban and Gulf markets.

In so doing, it benefited the country’s large, wealthy and internationally connected landholders at the expense of its rural smallholders. In the short term, this market-oriented production policy impoverished the country’s rural population by freeing it from the land. In the long term, it starved the whole country, today home to an estimated 30 million people, by reinforcing its dependence on imported wheat and other staples. Reporting on the findings of his ecological field of tribal farmers in al-Ahjur, a rich agricultural valley in the central highlands of Yemen, conducted in the late 1970s, Varisco concluded the following:

“The emphasis on new machinery, cash crops, and experimental farms represents a potential threat to viable traditional agricultural systems such as ghayl [Arabic for water flowing from springs] in al-Ahjur. The role of the small farmer, growing crops both for his own needs and for a regional market, is being challenged. Al-Ahjur represents all that is right with traditional agriculture in the Arab world. … Hopefully, the experience that has led to viable traditional agriculture in Yemen will not be ignored in the future development of the region and its resources.”

Many other informed experts have repeatedly cautioned that the injection of external agriculture technology and knowledge cripples Yemen’s development. In its titled “Groundwater depletion clouds Yemen’s solar energy revolution” published in April, the Conflict and Environment Observatory issued yet another blunt warning. According to the report, solar power is “vital to break a crippling dependency on diesel for water supplies but it risks increasing unsustainable groundwater abstraction.” The report states that “urgent action is needed by all stakeholders to prevent groundwater levels falling to the point that they become inaccessible,” stressing that “the consequences of inaction may be dire.” They already are.

Regrettably, all alarms sounded over Yemen’s food insecurity and water insecurity have been deliberately ignored. The obvious dispossession, displacement and imprudent exploitation of agricultural assets, labor and resources under neoliberal conditionalities make it a foregone conclusion to state that Yemen’s famine is but a historic policy failure, as Patnaik and Moyo demonstrate in their book. In the of Ali Kadri, “Yemeni labour and resources have to be continuously undermined and cheapened.” He explains: “The labouring classes in Yemen have to be denied control of their resources and readied to enter the global accumulation system as material of capital via its encroachment side.”

At any rate, agricultural policy in Yemen has commodified human life and dignity. Going forward, two things must change. First, Yemenis need to own their national development strategy. Second, the mainstream doctrines and attitudes toward the development of Yemen’s agriculture sector and the whole economy more broadly must change. In other words, postwar agricultural development policy must be both inward-looking and holistic. In agrarian societies, agriculture and rural production are integral to the whole economy. In the case of Yemen, a major change in agricultural policy that shifts away from ill-conceived neoliberal policies is inevitable, for they have not only silenced the interests of Yemen’s mostly rural population but famished the whole country.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51łÔąĎ’s editorial policy.

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