Yemen suffers ‘silent emergency’ as food runs short

By Hugh Macleod and Annasofie Flamand
Bilad at Taam, Yemen

BBC News
August 5, 2010
www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-10871020

Deep in the remote and rugged highlands 100 miles south-west of Sanaa lies Bilad at-Taam – the land of food - a large valley rimmed by mountains shimmering in the heat whose name has become a sad irony.

For this is one of the hungriest areas of Yemen, where an average of half of all families suffer from an acute and chronic shortage of food.

Hunger in Yemen is what aid workers here call a “silent emergency”. With the third highest rates of malnutrition in the world, worse than anywhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, generations of Yemeni children grow up stunted, physically and mentally less than their potential.

According to the World Food Programme (WFP) a third of the country, over seven million people, struggle daily to afford enough food to lead a healthy and productive life. Some 2.7 million are classified as severely food insecure, spending more than 30% of their meagre income on bread alone.

But there is no famine here. No vultures looming over skeletal babies. No film cameras to record flies landing on hollowed faces. No pop concert to raise awareness.

Hunger in Yemen is a fact of life, a quiet decline - in health, education, employment - passed from one generation to the next, blighting the lives of those three quarters of families living beyond the cities of this vast, unforgiving land, the rump of the Gulf, a roiling republic closer in many ways to East Africa than its orderly, energy-rich Arab neighbours.

‘The same every day’

Abdo Abdo al-Amry is a farmer from Bilad at-Taam who rides his motorbike as a taxi to earn a dollar or two a day to feed his family of twenty.

Standing at the edge of his family’s single stone room, built on hot, arid land beside a straw covered shelter and an outdoor clay oven, Abdo proudly introduces us to his 14 children.

Their smiling faces show little sign of starvation the world has come to know through TV.

But look closer and you see legs that are bony and thin supporting bodies smaller than is healthy for their age – the outcome of years of growing up never having enough to eat.

“The bread is made using firewood,” Abdo said, watching his children gather for their breakfast. “We get the okra from the market. Sometimes there is okra and sometimes there is nothing. We rely on bread for breakfast, lunch and dinner. The same every day.”

Beside the children are Abdo’s two wives. Though her black abbaya is long and loose, it can’t quite hide the bump that shows Saeda al-Amry, Abdo’s second wife, is pregnant, for the twelfth time. At an annual increase of nearly three percent, Yemen has one of the fastest growing populations in the world.

“I have been pregnant now for eight months and I have seven children, six girls and one boy,” Saeda told us. “Four of my children died. One of them was eight months old, but was very weak and thin due to lack of food. She died of dehydration. The rest died during my pregnancy. I had miscarriages.”

‘Home rather than school’

Yet hunger in Yemen is not just about poor health. For Abdo’s two daughters, Salama and Naima, it means not getting an education. In a country where gender inequality is the worst in the world, according to a survey by the World Economic Forum, girls often receive little or no schooling.

While the literacy rate for men is 70% it is only 30% for women.

To create an incentive for girls to attend school, WFP used to provide a sack of wheat to families like Abdo’s if their daughters regularly attended classes. The wheat handed out once a term off-set the cost of school books and of not having the girl working at home.

The scheme was a remarkable success. At the al-Fouz school in Rayma, the governorate of Bilad at-Taam, headmaster Ahmed Mohammed Ahmed explained that during the year the WFP scheme operated the number of girls attending his school rose from 18 to 61.

But WFP has been forced to cut back its Food for Education programme due to drastic funding shortfalls: mid way through the year the agency had received from donors less than one third of its required budget.

For Salama and Naima that meant no more wheat bags to bring home to their father, who saw little point in keeping them in school.

“We withdrew them because they stopped giving us wheat. So it is better to keep them at home rather than going to school,” said Abdo. “I am a poor person. That’s why I took them out. If there is wheat, they can go back.”

‘Woefully under-funded’

The UN’s first humanitarian aid appeal for Yemen remains, in the words of a recent statement from the White House, “woefully underfunded”, receiving by the middle of the year less than a third of its required $187 million.

In June, WFP was forced to halve rations it provides to some of the 300,000 internally displaced persons (IDPs), driven from their homes by war in north Yemen. Rations were also cut to 17,000 Somali refugees living in Kharaz camp in south Yemen, who are entirely dependent on food aid.

Despite a recent donation from the US of nearly $13m in cash and food to support its IDP operation, WFP warns that a $55m shortfall in the second half of 2010 will mean 90 percent of its planned 3.1 million monthly beneficiaries will be without critical food and nutrition support, including wasting children, pregnant mothers, school girls and severely food insecure people.

‘A mad distribution of wealth’

Abdel Karim al-Aryani, political advisor to Yemen’s President Ali Abdullah Saleh, says the international community has turned a blind eye to Yemen’s humanitarian crisis.

“The world is aware of Yemen as a haven for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular, that Yemen is a dangerous state,” said Aryani. “But they are only aware of the security side of Yemen. The human suffering is almost totally ignored.”

Critics of government policy, however, argue it is the state which has ignored the hunger crisis, failing to issue its own appeal for international assistance and presiding over endemic corruption that has brought the country to brink of starvation.

“The whole thing is a product of mad distribution of wealth,” said Abdul Ghani Aryani, an independent political analyst and relative of the president’s advisor.

“The problem now is that there are a small group of people who get hundreds of millions of dollars each year from the national budget while millions are getting nothing. If we distribute our resources properly we will not have starvation. We will still be poor, but we will not be in a state of chronic hunger.”

Sitting beside his dried up well that can no longer water crops, which even when they grew were too little to feed his family, Abdo contemplates the upheaval hunger may soon bring.

“We have become exhausted over the past eight months. If it stays like this for another year or two we may leave and migrate. How do you live in an area without anything?”

Appealing to donors at a press conference back in Sanaa, WFP Yemen representative Gian Carlo Cirri put it more bluntly.

“The destabilising role of hunger should not be underestimated,” he said. “It is of high concern because when people don’t have food they have three options. The first one is to revolt. The second is to migrate. And the third is to starve.”