Report: Yemen Needs Urgent Assistance to Prevent Famine

[Logo of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.] [Logo of the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.]

Report: Yemen Needs Urgent Assistance to Prevent Famine

By : Jadaliyya Reports

[The following report was issued by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) on 15 March 2017.]

Number of people at emergency food insecurity levels increases 20 per cent in nine months

15 March 2017, Sana`a/Amman - Severe food insecurity threatens more than 17 million people in conflict-ridden Yemen, according to the latest Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) analysis released by the United Nations and humanitarian partners today.

Twenty of the country`s 22 governorates are in ‘emergency` or ‘crisis` food insecurity phases and almost two-thirds of the population are now facing hunger and urgently require life and livelihood-saving assistance.  Without additional humanitarian and livelihoods support, Taiz and Al Hudaydah, two governorates accounting for almost a quarter of Yemen`s population, risk slipping into famine.

With an estimated 17 million people at ‘emergency` or ‘crisis` levels of food insecurity, Yemen is  currently one of the worst hunger crises in the world. These numbers represent a 21 percent increase since June 2016 and underscores the findings of the February 2017 Emergency Food Security and Nutrition Assessment.

Conflict is driving food insecurity

The conflict has had a devastating impact on food security and livelihoods. Almost 80 per cent of households in Yemen report having a worse economic situation than before the crisis. The decrease in domestic production, disruption of commercial and humanitarian imports, increasing food and fuel prices, rampant unemployment, loss of income, relatively low levels of funding for UN agencies providing food assistance and the collapse of public services and social safety nets are all factors contributing to a worsening food security situation.

Taiz and Al Hudaydah, traditionally food producing governorates, have been the focus of intense violence in the two years since the current crisis escalated.

These two governorates have the highest rates of global acute malnutrition in the country, ranging from 17 per cent in Taiz City to 25 percent in Al Hudaydah. The emergency threshold set by the World Health Organization is 15 percent.

"The conflict has a devastating impact on agricultural livelihoods. Crop and livestock production fell significantly compared to pre-crisis levels," said Salah Hajj Hassan, FAO Representative in Yemen. "It is absolutely essential that the humanitarian response encompass food and agriculture assistance to save not only lives but also livelihoods."

Stephen Anderson, WFP Representative and Country Director in Yemen said the situation had deteriorated rapidly since the conflict escalated two years ago. "The current dire food security and nutrition situation in Yemen requires significant financial resources to allow immediate, adequate and sustained food, nutrition and other assistance for those in greatest need to prevent a slide into famine," he said. "Unrestricted access to all areas, including for commercial trade, will also be critical to ensure the food insecurity in the country does not further deteriorate," he added.

"We are seeing the highest levels of acute malnutrition in Yemen`s recent history. Of the 2.2 million children suffering from acute malnutrition, 462,000 are Severely and Acutely Malnourished (SAM). To put things in perspective, a SAM child is ten times more at risk of death if not treated on time than a healthy child his or her age. The ongoing conflict and food insecurity will have long-term implications on the health and overall development of children in Yemen." said Dr Meritxell Relaño, UNICEF Representative.

Persistent insecurity disrupts livelihoods

Fighting along the Red Sea coast in recent months has caused extensive damage to Yemen`s largest port, Al Hudaydah. This has disrupted imports, which account for 90 per cent of Yemen`s staple foods. Access restrictions and the loss of boats, nets and other gear, have wiped out fishing - an important source of food and income. 

Insecurity along the coast will likely affect the start of the planting season for sorghum in April - the most important domestically produced cereal. Moreover it will hamper trade, force more people to leave their homes, further limit the availability of food and disrupt livelihoods.

Across Yemen as many as 2 million households engaged in agriculture now lack access to critical agricultural inputs, including seeds, fertiliser and fuel for irrigation pumps. High fuel prices also make irrigation prohibitively expensive.

Because of insecurity, humanitarian access may be soon limited to a few kilometres around main towns, leaving rural communities in dire need of aid.

The United Nations in Yemen reiterates its appeal for all parties to the conflict to facilitate unconditional and sustained access so humanitarian organizations can scale up their assistance to meet the growing demands of people in the most acute need.
 

  • ALSO BY THIS AUTHOR

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 9: Islamophobia, the West, and Genocide with Hatem Bazian

      Long Form Podcast Episode 9: Islamophobia, the West, and Genocide with Hatem Bazian

      Hatem Bazian addresses the historical trajectory of Islamophobia and its significance in understanding geopolitical transformation in the post-Cold War world. As Western ideologues shifted from their focus on the Soviet Union after the Cold War, and increasingly adopted the Clash of Civilizations paradigm to undergird their maintenance of global hegemony, Islam and Muslims replaced communism as the chief bogeyman. Bazian explains how and why this came about, and the centrality Palestine played in its development and operation, both in the West and for Israel. He also addresses US government disciplining of universities and particularly student activists.

    • Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      Long Form Podcast Episode 8: Resigning the State Department Over Gaza With Hala Rharrit

      In this episode of Long Form, Hala Rharrit discusses the factors that led her to resign from the US State Department, the mechanisms by which institutional corruption and ideological commitments of officials and representatives ensure US support for Israel, and how US decision-makers consistently violate international law and US laws/legislation. Rharrit also addresses the Trump administration’s claim that South Africa is perpetrating genocide against the country’s Afrikaaner population, and how this intersects with the US-Israeli campaign of retribution against South Africa for hauling Israel before the ICJ on charges of genocide.

    • Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      Emergency Teach-In — Israel’s Profound Existential Crisis: No Morals or Laws Left to Violate!

      The entire globe stands behind Israel as it faces its most intractable existential crisis since it started its slow-motion Genocide in 1948. People of conscience the world over are in tears as Israel has completely run out of morals and laws to violate during its current faster-paced Genocide in Gaza. Israelis, state and society, feel helpless, like sitting ducks, as they search and scramble for an inkling of hope that they might find one more human value to desecrate, but, alas, their efforts remain futile. They have covered their grounds impeccably and now have to face the music. This is an emergency call for immediate global solidarity with Israel’s quest far a lot more annihilation. Please lend a helping limb.

Past is Present: Settler Colonialism Matters!

On 5-6 March 2011, the Palestine Society at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London will hold its seventh annual conference, "Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine." This year`s conference aims to understand Zionism as a settler colonial project which has, for more than a century, subjected Palestine and Palestinians to a structural and violent form of destruction, dispossession, land appropriation and erasure in the pursuit of a new Jewish Israeli society. By organizing this conference, we hope to reclaim and revive the settler colonial paradigm and to outline its potential to inform and guide political strategy and mobilization.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is often described as unique and exceptional with little resemblance to other historical or ongoing colonial conflicts. Yet, for Zionism, like other settler colonial projects such as the British colonization of Ireland or European settlement of North America, South Africa or Australia, the imperative is to control the land and its resources -- and to displace the original inhabitants. Indeed, as conference keynote speaker Patrick Wolfe, one of the foremost scholars on settler colonialism and professor at La Trobe University in Victoria, Australia, argues, "the logic of this project, a sustained institutional tendency to eliminate the Indigenous population, informs a range of historical practices that might otherwise appear distinct--invasion is a structure not an event."[i]

Therefore, the classification of the Zionist movement as a settler colonial project, and the Israeli state as its manifestation, is not merely intended as a statement on the historical origins of Israel, nor as a rhetorical or polemical device. Rather, the aim is to highlight Zionism`s structural continuities and the ideology which informs Israeli policies and practices in Palestine and toward Palestinians everywhere. Thus, the Nakba -- whether viewed as a spontaneous, violent episode in war, or the implementation of a preconceived master plan -- should be understood as both the precondition for the creation of Israel and the logical outcome of Zionist settlement in Palestine.

Moreover, it is this same logic that sustains the continuation of the Nakba today. As remarked by Benny Morris, “had he [David Ben Gurion] carried out full expulsion--rather than partial--he would have stabilised the State of Israel for generations.”[ii] Yet, plagued by an “instability”--defined by the very existence of the Palestinian nation--Israel continues its daily state practices in its quest to fulfill Zionism’s logic to maximize the amount of land under its control with the minimum number of Palestinians on it. These practices take a painful array of manifestations: aerial and maritime bombardment, massacre and invasion, house demolitions, land theft, identity card confiscation, racist laws and loyalty tests, the wall, the siege on Gaza, cultural appropriation, and the dependence on willing (or unwilling) native collaboration and security arrangements, all with the continued support and backing of imperial power. 

Despite these enduring practices however, the settler colonial paradigm has largely fallen into disuse. As a paradigm, it once served as a primary ideological and political framework for all Palestinian political factions and trends, and informed the intellectual work of committed academics and revolutionary scholars, both Palestinians and Jews.

The conference thus asks where and why the settler colonial paradigm was lost, both in scholarship on Palestine and in politics; how do current analyses and theoretical trends that have arisen in its place address present and historical realities? While acknowledging the creativity of these new interpretations, we must nonetheless ask: when exactly did Palestinian natives find themselves in a "post-colonial" condition? When did the ongoing struggle over land become a "post-conflict" situation? When did Israel become a "post-Zionist" society? And when did the fortification of Palestinian ghettos and reservations become "state-building"?

In outlining settler colonialism as a central paradigm from which to understand Palestine, this conference re-invigorates it as a tool by which to analyze the present situation. In doing so, it contests solutions which accommodate Zionism, and more significantly, builds settler colonialism as a political analysis that can embolden and inform a strategy of active, mutual, and principled Palestinian alignment with the Arab struggle for self-determination, and indigenous struggles in the US, Latin America, Oceania, and elsewhere.

Such an alignment would expand the tools available to Palestinians and their solidarity movement, and reconnect the struggle to its own history of anti-colonial internationalism. At its core, this internationalism asserts that the Palestinian struggle against Zionist settler colonialism can only be won when it is embedded within, and empowered by, the broader Arab movement for emancipation and the indigenous, anti-racist and anti-colonial movement--from Arizona to Auckland.

SOAS Palestine Society invites everyone to join us at what promises to be a significant intervention in Palestine activism and scholarship.

For over 30 years, SOAS Palestine Society has heightened awareness and understanding of the Palestinian people, their rights, culture, and struggle for self-determination, amongst students, faculty, staff, and the broader public. SOAS Palestine society aims to continuously push the frontiers of discourse in an effort to make provocative arguments and to stimulate debate and organizing for justice in Palestine through relevant conferences, and events ranging from the intellectual and political impact of Edward Said`s life and work (2004), international law and the Palestine question (2005), the economy of Palestine and its occupation (2006), the one state (2007), 60 Years of Nakba, 60 Years of Resistance (2009), and most recently, the Left in Palestine (2010).

For more information on the SOAS Palestine Society 7th annual conference, Past is Present: Settler Colonialism in Palestine: www.soaspalsoc.org

SOAS Palestine Society Organizing Collective is a group of committed students that has undertaken to organize annual academic conferences on Palestine since 2003.

 


[i] Patrick Wolfe, Settler Colonialism and the Transformation of Anthropology: The Politics and Poetics of an Ethnographic Event, Cassell, London, p. 163

[ii] Interview with Benny Morris, Survival of the Fittest, Haaretz, 9. January 2004, http://cosmos.ucc.ie/cs1064/jabowen/IPSC/php/art.php?aid=5412