The Drying of Yemen's Agricultural Economy

Shibam, Yemen
Photo: Yemen Profile, BBC

“No famine has ever taken place in the history of the world in a functioning democracy.” 

—  Amartya Sen, Nobel Prize Winning Economist

“[Yemen's] environmental disaster was born in the 1970s when the oil/construction boom exploded in the Persian Gulf, and some two million to three million unskilled Yemeni men left their villages to build Saudi Arabia. “As a result,” said [Abdul Rahman al-Eryani, Yemen’s former minister of water and environment], “the countryside was depopulated of manpower.” Women resorted to cutting trees for fuel and the terraces eroded because of lack of maintenance. That led to widespread erosion of hillsides and the massive silting of the wadis — seasonal riverbeds — whose rich soil used to support three crops a year, including Yemen’s famed coffee. The silting up of the wadis crushed the coffee business and led Yemenis to grow other cash crops that needed less fertile soil. The best was qat, the narcotic leaf to which this country is addicted. But qat requires a lot of water, and that led to overdrafting of groundwater.

“...Qat drank all the water, and the easy oil money seduced the rural manpower into leaving for unskilled jobs. But now that most of the Yemeni workers have been sent home from Saudi Arabia, they are finding a country running out of water, with few jobs, and a broken public school system that teaches more religion than science. As a result, what Yemen needs most — an educated class not tied to an increasingly water-deprived agriculture — it cannot get, not without much better leadership and a new political consensus.”

— Thomas Friedman, NYTimes

The Drying of Yemen's Agricultural Economy