Attachments
Yemen has roughly eight times the population of neighboring Oman, three times the population of the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and approximately the same number of people as regional powerhouse Saudi Arabia. The country’s population jumped from 18 million to 24 million from 2001-2013. Yemen has one of the largest numbers of mouths to feed in the region on one of the tightest budgets.
Despite common misconceptions of Yemen, it is not one massive, arid desert. The country has five distinct agro-ecological zones and while its bodies of water may be few, Yemenis have been practicing terraced agriculture on the country’s steep hillsides for millennia. Terraced farming, which works for several different types of crops, is built on hillsides and minimizes water wastage. As run-off water flows down into an adjacent field it provides water to the next crop and helps prevent soil erosion.
Yemen mainly produces sorghum, a particularly drought-resistant cereal, as well as potatoes, wheat, corn, and chickpeas. While the country does produce some food, it does not produce nearly enough for domestic consumption, nor does it produce many of the foods that its citizens have developed a particular taste for. In 2013, with a gross domestic product (GDP) of $36 billion, Yemen spent $145 million on corn imports, $363 million on rice, $400 million on sugar, and a staggering $1 billion on wheat imports. The price of food in Yemen is simply a reflection of the international price of food—a reality which, for the past several years, has been a very bad thing for the country.
Events in Yemen over the past several years make sense when they are viewed through the lens of politics. But they make even more sense when contextualized in regard to food. While the Yemeni government has historically offered some subsidies to its farmers, they have been relatively modest and therefore so have been the policies’ results. Neighboring Oman, for example, provides more aggressive and effective agricultural support programs, and the average yields for an Omani wheat farmer are nearly twice those of their southwestern neighbors.
This shortcoming in productivity helps feed the dependency on imports, which ultimately means vulnerability to external price shocks. Yemen was at the mercy of the global commodity crisis of 2008, and again during a secondary price spike in 2011. These global shocks were occurring as domestic food security dwindled during a time of drought in 2008 and 2009.
These shocks happened in the context of chronic food insecurity. More than half of Yemeni children suffer from stunted growth, giving the country a level of malnutrition in children second only to Afghanistan. The prevalence of food inadequacy, which is a calculation based on the number of calories that would be necessary to sustain moderate physical activity, is about 36 percent. This means more than one-third of Yemenis do not have enough food. And while poverty and malnutrition rates have been falling in many parts of the world, they have remained unwaveringly high in Yemen.