A member of the Houthi rebel militia stands guard at the Al Iman Islamic University which they seized control of in Sanaa yesterday.
An escalation of political turmoil in Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the world, risks aggravating an already dire food security situation, the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) said yesterday.
Shia Muslim rebels seized the capital Sanaa this month, prompting President Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi to warn of a drift towards civil war in a country long riven by deep political, religious and tribal divisions.
One in four Yemenis is undernourished and more than half of Yemen’s 25mn people are ‘food insecure’, that is lacking access to sufficient food for their needs, FAO regional co-ordinator Ad Spijkers told a news conference in Abu Dhabi.
With a high proportion of the population living off the land and some 90% of Yemen’s water resources being used in agriculture, people are especially vulnerable when conflicts disrupt farm production, FAO officials said.
“In every effort to improve food security and nutrition you need stability and in Yemen two thirds of the population depend on agriculture,” said Spijkers.
“So if people are displaced and they can’t grow food for their own families then there is a very severe situation.”
Compounding Yemen’s plight, nearly half of its irrigation water goes to growing qat, a narcotic leaf that fetches a high price on local markets, rather than to growing staple crops.
The cash-strapped government has to import 90% of the wheat and 100% of the rice it needs to feed its people.
This heavy reliance on global food markets, coupled with dwindling foreign exchange as a result of a slump in oil exports, is aggravating Yemen’s food vulnerability, FAO said.
Yemen earned just $671mn from exporting crude oil in January-May, down nearly 40% from a year earlier, as a result of frequent bombings of its oil and gas pipelines, mostly by disgruntled tribesmen feuding with the state.
The FAO’s Yemen representative, Salah Elhajj Hassan, said by telephone from Sanaa yesterday that Yemen’s conflicts were hampering even the most basic aid programmes such as distributing agricultural inputs to farmers in rural areas.
“As we speak we are trying to send some assistance to Jawf province but we have a problem doing that because of the severity of the situation there,” he said.
As well as the violence in Sanaa, Yemen also faces regular attacks by Al Qaeda - most recently on Sunday when a suicide bomber killed at least 15 people - and protests by southern separatists demanding secession from the country.
FAO has been working with international donors to help modernise Yemen’s agricultural sector and around 40 projects have been identified in the past two years.
“Some of these projects have seen the light after being selected by various donors but the current situation in Yemen ... is hampering progress on the ground and donors will only add more if they see results,” said Sirelkhatim Mohamed, a FAO investment officer working on the issue.
Yemen’s National Food Security Strategy, set up as a response to a spike in global food prices in 2008, aimed to cut food insecurity by a third by 2015 and to make 90% of the population food secure by 2020.
But the strategy, which included plans to set up a strategic grain reserve, has been severely hampered by the instability plaguing Yemen since street protests ousted former president Al Abdullah Saleh in 2011, a recent FAO report on the country said.
Qaeda group launches attacks on Shia rebels
An Al Qaeda group in Yemen has launched three attacks against Shia rebels, vowing a tough fight against the insurgents who overran the capital last week, officials and witnesses said yesterday.
Gunmen from Ansar al-Shariah opened fire on Sunday night at a vehicle in the central Baida province, killing all six rebels on board, witnesses said.
In Sanaa, two rebels were wounded when an explosive device went off, also on Sunday night, near a checkpoint, a security official said, accusing Al Qaeda of being behind the attack.
The attacks followed a suicide bombing earlier in the day that targeted a small hospital used by Houthi rebels in Majzar, 80km east of Sanaa, tribal sources said.
Ansar al-Shariah, a group linked to Al Qaeda, said on Twitter that it carried out the attack which had caused “dozens” of casualties.
The rebels swept down from their stronghold in the rugged northwestern mountains last month, demanding economic and political reforms.
On September 21, they seized key state installations without resistance, most of them in northern Sanaa, after clashes on the city’s outskirts with Islamists killed more than 270 people.
Al Qaeda vowed on Wednesday to fight the rebels in defence of Sunni Muslims, three days after the insurgents overran Sanaa.
“We have unsheathed our sharp swords to defend you,” Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula said in a statement, warning the Shia rebels of the “unbearable”.
“Your heads will fly off,” the statement threatened the rebels, charging that the Houthis’ takeover of Sanaa was the “outcome of a Persian plot in Yemen”.
Sanaa has repeatedly accused Iran of backing the rebels.
