Famine in Yemen (2016–present)

Since 2016, a famine has been ongoing in Yemen which started during the Yemeni Civil War.[10] More than 85,000 children have died as a result of the famine as of 2018. In May 2020, UNICEF described Yemen as "the largest humanitarian crisis in the world", and estimated that 80% of the population, over 24 million people, were in need of humanitarian assistance.[11] The famine is being compounded by an outbreak of cholera, which is resulting in 5,000 new cases daily in June 2017.[12] Devastation of Yemeni infrastructure, health, water and sanitation systems and facilities by Saudi-led coalition air strikes led to the spread of cholera.[13][14][15] UNICEF says that there have been many attacks on water systems in Yemen cutting of water to many.[16]

Famine in Yemen
المجاعة في اليمن
CountryYemen
Period2016–present
Total deathsMore than 85,000 children (adults unknown)
(2018 estimate)[1][2][3][4][5]
Death rateAt least 130 children (adults unknown) per day
(December 2016–November 2017 estimate)[6][7]
Observations
Consequences2016–2020 Yemen cholera outbreak

After 5 November 2017, the famine in Yemen was compounded by Saudi Arabia, who tightened its sea, air and land blockade of Yemen.[17][18][19][20][21] According to the manager of Al Hudaydah port, which is under the control of the Houthis, medicine and food cannot go to Al-Hudaydah, since Saudi-led airstrikes destroyed the port's industrial cranes in August 2015.[22] On 23 November 2017, the blockade was partially but not fully lifted,[23] and some humanitarian supplies were allowed into the country.[24]

In October 2018, the United Nations warned that 13 million people face starvation in what could be "the worst famine in the world in 100 years."[25] The following month, a report by Save the Children estimated that 85,000 children under the age of five have died from starvation.[26]

According to the Global Hunger Index, Yemen is suffering from the highest hunger score in the world, after Central African Republic.[27]

Causes

Saudi Arabian-led intervention

The famine is the direct result of the Saudi Arabian-led intervention in Yemen and blockade.[28][29][30][31] Yemen was already the most impoverished nation in the Arabian Peninsula and the Middle East, and Al Hudaydah one of the poorest cities of Yemen, but the war and the naval blockade[32][33] by the Saudi-led coalition and the United States Navy[34] made the situation much worse. Fishing boats, the main livelihood of Al Hudaydah's residents, were destroyed by Saudi airstrikes,[35][36][37] leaving them without any means to provide for their families.[38][39] As a result, one child dies every ten minutes on average.[40] A UN panel of experts found that Saudi Arabia is purposefully obstructing the delivery of humanitarian aid into Yemen.[41]

Saudi Arabia was reported to be deliberately targeting means of food production and distribution in Yemen[42] by bombing farms,[43][44] fishing boats,[45] ports,[46] food storages, food factories,[47][48] and other businesses[49] in order to exacerbate famine. These actions led to the UN accusing the Saudi-led coalition of committing war crimes and having a "complete disregard for human life".[50][49][51][52][53] 1,500 schools were damaged and destroyed during Yemeni Civil War.[54] After Saudi-backed Hadi's forces retook Mocha from Houthis they barred fishermen from working.[55][56] The Union of Yemeni fishermen accused the coalition of waging war against fishermen.[57]

U.S. Senator Chris Murphy accused the United States of complicity in Yemen's humanitarian crisis, saying: "Thousands and thousands inside Yemen today are dying. ... This horror is caused in part by our decision to facilitate a bombing campaign that is murdering children and to endorse a Saudi strategy inside Yemen that is deliberately using disease and starvation and the withdrawal of humanitarian support as a tactic."[58]

The British researcher Alex de Waal has considered the famine in Yemen as

The world’s worst since North Korea in the 1990s and the one in which Western responsibility is clearest... Britain has sold at least £4.5 billion in arms to Saudi Arabia and £500 million to the UAE since the war began. The US role is even bigger: Trump authorised arms sales to the Saudis worth $110 billion last May. Yemen will be the defining famine crime of this generation, perhaps this century.[59]

Doctors Without Borders (MSF) has been assisting victims of the famine and the cholera outbreak, as well as providing mental health assistance to those who have been affected by the war.[60]

Houthi food confiscation

Houthi rebels have been accused of unlawfully confiscating food and medicine from civilians under their control by organizations including Human Rights Watch (HRW), MSF, and the World Food Programme (WFP), with a WFP survey finding that food aid was not reaching the majority of those eligible to receive it in Houthi–held Sanaʽa and Saada.[61][62]

2016

Abd Rabbuh Mansour Hadi's decision to relocate the Central Bank of Yemen to Aden in September 2016 was reported to have exacerbated the vulnerable living conditions of the population. The move "was aimed primarily at disabling the Houthi-Saleh administered bureaucracy based in Sana’a. Instead, it provoked a severe liquidity crisis that has fueled famine, as somewhere between 8.5 million and 10 million Yemenis rely on public sector salaries that have been unpaid for more than a year."[63]

Sana'a Centre for Strategical Studies recorded that the banking crisis in fact began in early 2010 when American banks began closing the accounts of Yemeni banks, and with the start of the conflict in 2011, as Yemen came under UN Chapter 7 jurisdiction. "Large European and American banks ceased to interact with Yemeni banks completely. Yemeni banks became both unable to honor customer requests to withdraw cash – leading to further hoarding outside the banking system – and had no domestic currency to deposit at the Central Bank of Yemen. These multiple, interrelated and mutually reinforcing factors helped instigate a severe public sector cash liquidity crisis in mid-2016."[64]

2017
Protest against U.S. involvement in the military intervention in Yemen, New York City, 2017

More than 50,000 children in Yemen died from starvation during 2017.[1][2][3][4]

On 5 November 2017, the Saudi-led coalition began blocking all fuel shipments to Yemen, causing farmers to abandon modern equipment like tractors and forcing hospitals to function without generators.[65][66]

On 11 December 2017, Jamie McGoldrick, the UN's humanitarian coordinator for Yemen, affirmed that 8 million in the country are in danger of famine unless access to immediate humanitarian aid is allowed.[67][68] On 13 December 2017, USAID administrator, Mark Andrew Green, stated that there are no signs that the blockade had been in any way eased and Yemeni ports are still fully blocked.[69][70]

According to The Economist, another major cause of the famine is the popularity of the cultivation and consumption of khat, which requires a significant amount of water to grow in addition to being the most popular drug in Yemen.[9] Khat cultivation is monopolised by the Houthi rebels.[9]

2018

In July 2018, a 25% increase in severe hunger cases in Yemen compared to 2017 was reported.[71]

In a September 2018 column in The New York Times, Nicholas Kristof stated that the United States is supporting crimes against humanity in Yemen, adding that "America is helping to kill, maim and starve Yemeni children. At least eight million Yemenis are at risk of starvation from an approaching famine caused not by crop failures but by our actions and those of our allies. The United Nations has called it the world's worst humanitarian crisis, and we own it."[72]

In October 2018, World Peace Foundation released a report documenting systematic targeting and destruction of food production and distribution infrastructure in Yemen by the Saudi-led coalition.[73]

On 31 October 2018, the United States and the United Kingdom, Saudi Arabia's biggest arm suppliers, called for a ceasefire in the conflict in Yemen. A press release from the United States Secretary of State, Michael Pompeo, stated "A cessation of hostilities and vigorous resumption of a political track will help ease the humanitarian crisis as well. It is time to end this conflict, replace conflict with compromise, and allow the Yemeni people to heal through peace and reconstruction."[74] On 10 November 2018, the U.S. announced it would no longer refuel coalition aircraft operating over Yemen.[75] The U.S. continues its backing of the Saudi-led intervention with weapons sales and intelligence sharing.[76]

In November 2018, according to the New York Times report, 1.8 million children in Yemen are severely malnourished.[77]

2019

On 3 August 2019, a United Nations report said the US, UK and France may be complicit in committing war crimes in Yemen by selling weapons and providing support to the Saudi-led coalition which is using the starvation of civilians as a tactic of warfare.[78][79]

2020

As of March 2020, UNICEF estimates that 2 million children under the age of 5 suffer from acute malnutrition and require treatment.[80]

According to a report by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the United Nations children’s agency and the World Food Programme (WFP) and partners, 40 per cent of the Yemen’s population was expected to suffer from acute food insecurity because of the war, flood, coronavirus and locust swarms, by the end of 2020. Within 6 months “high levels of acute food insecurity” was estimated to increase from 2 million to 3.2 million, even if the food aid was maintained.[81]

gollark: What does Microsoft actually *do* with all the problems which get reported to them?
gollark: Evil idea: find an exploit in a popular debugger, and make an obfuscated program which uses it to release BEES™ onto your computer when debugged.
gollark: It does still have bugs, though, but almost certainly not "arbitrary code execution (or other significant badness) through a bound query parameter".
gollark: They have 600 times more testing code than, well, library code, and cover *all* of the machine code code paths.
gollark: The only possible way you could SQL-inject it (technically it wouldn't be SQL injection but same principle) would be exploiting some kind of bug in SQLite itself. This is unlikely, as SQLite may literally be one of the most well-tested pieces of software in existence.

See also

References
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