https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5099-8943
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ABSTRACT
The pervasive and persistent impact of agricultural de-development is a common thread through the agrarian south. Until about two generations ago, Yemen had been agriculturally self-sufficient owing to its fabled systems of agriculture. However, bad policy, bad evidence, bad governance, and constant warfare have each played their respective part in forging the country's food crisis, rural impoverishment, and ecological distress. To address these root causes of Yemen's social dislocation and dismantling of its indigenous agroecological practices and self-sufficient food economy, I bring into focus the fundamental question of Yemen's national development by way of posing the agrarian question in Yemen as a question of independence and autonomy. I argue for sensible, inward-looking, and pro-production policy action that not only promotes durable growth but also progressively restores Yemenis' sovereignty as well as security.
Acknowledgement
This study of Yemen’s agrarian and rural social crisis was supported by a seed grant from the ‘Yemeni Voices’ project of the Institute of Global Affairs (IGA) of the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE). IGA’s support aimed at identifying effective policy interventions for sustainable development in Yemen. I am grateful to Martha Mundy, Professor Emerita of Anthropology at LSE, for her advice. I am also grateful to the anonymous experts who reviewed this article for their insightful comments. Without all of them and the dedicated scholarly work of several others, this study would have buried Yemeni voices, from Zabid to al-Ghaydah and from Tuban to Madhab, beneath raw data and aimlessly sailed out upon the open sea of literature on the Global South and the Arab world. Thanks is also due to the editorial team of the Journal of Peasant Studies for helping me improve the articulation of my research and discussions beyond what I could have achieved alone, to Emelie Kozak for helping me improve the language of an early draft of the article, and to the publisher for the tremendous effort in putting this publication together.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 According to one estimate, Yemen’s agrarian history stretches back to ‘ten centuries before the Christian Era and sixteen centuries before Islam’ (Tutwiler Citation1987, 12).
2 Taken as a whole, the entire country was agriculturally self-sufficient, especially in staple grains. Former PDRY produced up to 40% of its food grains in the early 1980s, including 100% of its sorghum (Lackner Citation1985, 187).
3 A staple is defined as ‘one that is eaten regularly and in such quantities as to constitute the dominant part of the diet and supply a major proportion of energy and nutrient needs’ (FAO Citation1995, chapter entitled ‘Staple foods: What do people eat?’, 21).
4 Throughout this article, ‘tonnes’ refers to ‘metric tons’, which is exactly 1,000 kilograms, or 2,204.6 pounds.
6 The following passage from Kadri’s (Citation2015, 2) book provides an important insight into the relationship between material dependency and intellectual dependency, a topic that is examined further by Ajl (Citation2019):
There is plenty of evidence to support the hypothesis of de-development. Ironically, there is even evidence in the lack of evidence. Whereas states on the road to development produce evidentiary statistics to assess their own course of development, most Arab states have ceased to produce adequate statistics. This is so not because of national security concerns—these states have little national security left. It is because de-development has become so pervasive that producing knowledge in the form of statistics exceeds their productive capabilities. These nations have hollowed out the production of knowledge, which is additional evidence that they have undergone a process of de-development. In the 1960s and 1970s, Iraq, Egypt, Algeria and Syria produced sophisticated input–output models meant to guide planning in the economy. Now, the paucity of data in almost all areas of economic and social activity tells of retrogression.
7 In standard foreign exchange notation, currency pairs are written in this format: the base currency followed by the counter currency, also called the quote currency, separated by a slash. The currency pair is then followed by the exchange rate. Thus, USD/YER x means that one United States dollar can be exchanged for x Yemeni rials.
8 Based on these observations of the character and effect of the international development complex’s interventions in Yemen, it is imperative to distinguish between humanitarian and developmental interventions in Yemen. For instance, Mundy (Citation2020, 82), observes that the World Bank and other major international agencies had waited for over a year before they began selectively to re-engage in Yemen during the ongoing war. The latest World Bank-led Resilience agenda that aims at reducing humanitarian assistance to Yemen in the midst of the ongoing war is another case in point. In the same vein, whereas FAO until recently warned against the slightest disruption to food assistance in Yemen, emphasizing in its strong statement famine, starvation, and hunger (see: http://web.archive.org/web/20200922180132/http:/www.fao.org/emergencies/crisis/yemen/intro/en/), they have now published a diluted version of their earlier statement on Yemen's crisis (see: https://www.fao.org/emergencies/crisis/yemen/intro/en/).
9 See also Tutwiler (Citation1987, 12–13) for a description of Yemen’s geographic and climatic regions, and Varisco (Citation2019, 318, Figure 1) for a clearly marked topographic map. For a vector (high-resolution) map of Yemen and its administrative divisions, see: https://reliefweb.int/sites/reliefweb.int/files/resources/a0_yemen_administrative_map_with_roads_and_elevation_29june2015.pdf
10 To counter the ‘illusion’ and ‘romantic populism’ of agricultural self-sufficiency, Collier (Citation2008) advocates for three policies. First, allowing large commercial organizations, even if ‘not perfect’, to replace peasant agriculture, even if based on genuine democratic participation in planning and control of production. The justification for this policy is as follows:
Peasants, like pandas, are to be preserved. But distressingly, peasants, like pandas, show little inclination to reproduce themselves. Given the chance, peasants seek local wage jobs, and their offspring head to the cities. This is because at low-income levels, rural bliss is precarious, isolated, and tedious.
11 Ironically, the United States later complained that European subsidies on wheat flour exports were not fair. See the report of the panel that was established to examine the complaint (Committee on Subsidies and Countervailing Measures Citation1983).
12 The following extracts illustrate the extent to which YAR’s agricultural policy was misguided:
YAR’s commodity exports are negligible, reflecting the country’s limited resources and the underdeveloped state of its economy. Productivity levels are still extremely low, especially in agriculture which accounts for about 70 percent of the labor force. Agriculture’s development has been constrained by the scarcity of agricultural land and water and the high cost of production. Water related issues are among the most serious in the medium- and long-run. Water resources are scarce and are being depleted rapidly around cities and towns. […] the continuous increase in imports, together with the levelling-off in workers’ remittances resulted in a large decline in foreign reserves, from 16 months of imports of goods and services in 1977/78 to 3.5 months by end 1982. […] Since the early 1970s, the country has been trying to develop human resources and build new institutions, to strengthen the physical and social infrastructure, to raise the productivity of the commodity-producing sectors, and to improve the standard of living of the people, giving priority to their basic needs. Most of the First Plan’s targets which were in line with these objectives have been met except in the agriculture sector where the output of some traditional crops has declined and overall growth fell considerably below targeted levels. The primary reason for this appears [added emphasis] to have been the abandonment of marginal rain-fed areas where income opportunities could not compete with the opportunities of migration. The production of qat (a mild stimulant) has been on the increase and has competed for agricultural land. (World Bank Citation1985, 2, 3)
13 Yemen’s fuel subsidy reforms have failed to redistribute and invest saved public revenue into key priority sectors, including agriculture. The reforms neither reduced production costs nor increased the quality or quantity of agricultural output as was proclaimed. Instead, poverty, food insecurity, and malnutrition continued to rise at alarming rates, fuel shortages became more severe, and public spending on agriculture did not increase. Particularly, the reforms were not accompanied by other necessary reforms to guarantee their success; that is, they were not holistic in their approach to the problem. Hence, they remain questionable and controversial.
14 At the onset of the war, wheat flour imports increased significantly because of lost domestic milling capacity of mills and silos due to airstrikes (Basha Citation2018, 23). Specifically, wheat flour imports increased more than seven times one year into the war, from 35 thousand tonnes in 2014 to 258 thousand tonnes in 2015 (i.e. an increase of 637%), which is estimated to be a quarter of what Yemen used to import in 1998 (Alexander Citation2001)—at that time, Yemen was regarded as the world’s largest importer of flour due to its lacking domestic milling capacity (Alexander Citation2001).
15 ICLS standards are statistical standards set by the International Conference of Labour Statisticians, which is periodically hosted by the International Labour Organization of the United Nations.
16 Food balance sheets are explained by FAO as follows:
Food Balance Sheet presents a comprehensive picture of the pattern of a country’s food supply during a specified reference period. The food balance sheet shows for each food item—i.e. each primary commodity and a number of processed commodities potentially available for human consumption—the sources of supply and its utilization. The total quantity of foodstuffs produced in a country added to the total quantity imported and adjusted to any change in stocks that may have occurred since the beginning of the reference period [minus exports] gives the supply available during that period. (See: http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#data/FBS)
Further, note that FAO’s food balance sheets provide utilization data in addition to the supply and sources of supply data presented herein, which can be used to carry out additional analysis on food gap (i.e., production minus consumption), self-sufficiency (i.e., production divided by consumption), production deficit (i.e., importation divided by consumption), and self-sufficiency ratio calculated as (Production ×100)/(Production+Imports-Exports).
17 Land inequality is at the heart of broader inequalities, namely, wealth, power, gender, health, and environment, especially in agrarian societies. Thus, land use, sharing, and ownership are key to the future of Yemeni smallholding agriculturalists; ignoring land inequality threatens not only rural livelihoods but the entire population of the country because land provides water, food, and natural resources to everybody. For an understanding of the central issue of land inequality and the shocking state of this common good in the world, see Anseeuw and Baldinelli (Citation2020).
18 In May 2016—one year since the adoption of the United Nations Security Council’s resolution S/RES/2216 (2015) (https://www.un.org/securitycouncil/s/res/2216-%282015%29-0)—the United Nations Verification and Inspection Mechanism (UNVIM) was established in Djibouti to assume the responsibility for cargo inspection imposed by the naval blockade on all Yemeni seaports, notwithstanding the fact that the resolution stipulated imposing a targeted arms embargo against specific individuals, not a naval blockade. Consequently, all vessels carrying bulk and containerized commercial cargo, whether being transhipped or delivered directly to any of Yemen’s seaports that are not controlled by the Saudi Coalition forces (i.e. Port of al-Hodeidah, Port of Mokha, and Port of al-Saleef, and their associated terminals), must notify UNVIM upon departure of the port of origin of their cargo. UNVIM then decides if a cargo inspection is required and reroutes vessels to a mutually agreed meeting point within international waters for an inspection. If UNVIM decides that further inspection is required, vessels are rerouted to Djibouti where their entire cargo gets offloaded and screened. All related costs that result from these measures are borne by the shipping company in charge of the shipment.
19 A FAO emergency bulletin (FAO in Emergencies Citationn.d.) reported the following on the situation of the Yemen crisis as of 2019: ‘more than 20 million Yemenis are food insecure, including nearly 10 million who are on the brink of famine [original emphasis] and starvation [original emphasis]. Two-thirds of all districts in the country are already pre-famine.’ (Recently, the bulletin has dropped its firm warning against any slight disruption in food assistance, stressed regional priorities [“southern districts” versus “the country”], revised the figure down to 16 million and the two-thirds to a half, and changed the vocabulary whereby confirmation, certainty, and proactivity [“will face”, “a first-ever assessment”] were substituted with indication, projection, and speculation [“potential deterioration”, “an analysis”].) In 2020, the United Nations warned that ‘the risk of famine persists’ in Yemen, adding that it faces, along with other countries, the imminent threat of famines of ‘biblical proportions’ (UN Citation2020).
20 The Financial Action Task Force (FATF), a global watchdog and an inter-governmental, policy-making body, has put Yemen under its list of ‘High-Risk Jurisdictions subject to a Call for Action.’ See FATF’s list (https://www.fatf-gafi.org/countries/#other-monitored-jurisdictions) and published periodic statements on Yemen (https://www.fatf-gafi.org/countries/#Yemen).
21 Specifically, between September 2012 and March 2015, $10,234,824,000 was pledged and allocated, $8,030,591,000 was approved, and $4,518,591,000 was disbursed. For a visual and interactive summary of international aid to Yemen to support its 2012–2014 political transition, visit https://public.tableau.com/views/YemenAidAbsorption/Summary.
22 According to ILO’s report (Citation2016, 14), the situation of Yemeni labour gets more complicated ‘due to the damage of facilities and overall operations of the education and health sectors, exacerbating the already extremely demanding education and employment challenges.’
23 Author’s report on the findings of an independent third-party monitoring of the implementation of some activities funded under the World Bank’s Smallholder Agricultural Production Restoration and Enhancement Project (SAPREP). SAPREP was prepared based on a proposal submitted by the government of Yemen in June 2013 to the Global Agriculture and Food Security Program (GAFSP). Launched in August 2017 and funded by the Bank as a grant of $36 million over 36 months to FAO, SAPREP’s ultimate development objective was to increase the use of productivity and nutrition-enhancing agricultural practices by smallholders in targeted districts in the governorates of Abyan, al-Hodeidah, Hajjah, Lahj, Sa’adah, Shabwah, and Taiz, which were identified as the most food insecure governorates in Yemen, as identified by the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) carried out in February 2017 to classify the severity and magnitude of food insecurity. These governorates cover highland and lowland areas that represent the main agroecological systems in Yemen. Together, according to the Bank, the seven selected governorates account for 42% of Yemen’s population overall and 48% of Yemen’s poor population specifically. For more information about SAPREP, refer to the World Bank’s (Citation2017) project appraisal document.
24 For more important insights on this period, see Elie’s (Citation2013, 5–8) exposition and genealogy of the national politics of consumption and polity formation, including the instrumentalization of qat pre-1962.
25 Keeler (Citationn.d.) gives a beautiful account of Anthony Milroy’s field research in Yemen and research on the topic, which provides deeper insights into the importance of Yemen’s mountain terraces and, by extension, other agroecological forms of production elsewhere in the country.
26 The following passage from the United Nations captures the essence of true development:
[The Declaration on the Right to Development] demanded better governance of the international economic framework. And it re-defined development as far deeper, broader and more complex than the narrow, growth-and-profit focus of previous decades.The goal of development is to improve the well-being of every member of society. People are not the how of development—not mere tools which can be exploited to produce greater wealth for limited élites. They are the why. True development roots out and corrects the causes of poverty—the multiple human rights violations which have deprived people of power, control over resources, and a voice in their government, economy and society, and denied equal participation in global governance. True development generates greater social justice, not deeper exploitation; and it reduces the towering inequalities which confiscate the fundamental rights of those who are marginalised and poor. (OHCHR Citationn.d.)
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Zaid Ali Basha
Zaid Ali Basha is an independent management consultant with broad experience in research and analytics, social and economic development, and public sector reform. He has led and collaborated on multi-disciplinary international development projects in East Africa, the Middle East, and South Asia. Throughout the ongoing war in Yemen, Zaid has contributed to the literature on economic impacts of the war; synthesized widely fragmented prewar and wartime macroeconomic and sectoral data related to key socioeconomic and developmental issues; and proposed priority interventions and evidence-informed postwar public policy options. Previously, Zaid worked as a Monitoring and Evaluation Specialist at the Government of Yemen’s Executive Bureau for Acceleration of Aid Absorption and Support for Policy Reforms (The Executive Bureau). To support the implementation of the country’s Transitional Program for Stabilization and Development 2012–2014, Zaid monitored and reported on progress made on commitments by the Yemeni government and regional and international donors under what was known as the Mutual Accountability Framework.