Feature: Delayed rains, costly diesel squeeze Yemen's farmers amid conflict

The Star

a day ago

by Mohamed Al-Azaki and Mohammed Mohammed
SANAA, July 18 (Xinhua) -- The rainy season that arrived three months late has left farmers in Luluwah, west of the Houthi-held Yemeni capital Sanaa, desperately tending to their crops with expensive diesel and unreliable solar pumps, underscoring how climate shocks are compounding wartime hardship in one of the world's most food insecure countries.
This year the rain simply didn't come, said farmer Mohammed Saleh al-Jamal, who has abandoned his diesel tractor and returned to a donkey-drawn plow to prepare his fields. "Without rain, we lose money in purchasing expensive diesel to operate water pumps for irrigation. And when there's cloud and fog, our solar-powered pumps don't work for long hours to cover large swathes of our farms."
Fuel shortages and price spikes are pushing growers to revive labor-intensive methods. Younger men are back on family plots, al-Jamal said, forming what he called "a new generation of resilient farmers shaped by war."
Getting crops to market is another battle. Fragmented supply chains, fuel costs, insecurity on roads, and weak cold storage wipe out profits.
"Authorities should help distribute our products to markets in Sanaa and other provinces, based on supply and demand," al-Jamal said.
He urged private investors to build small processing lines, such as tomato paste, beans, packaged potatoes, and cold stores that would let farmers sell gradually instead of dumping crops at harvest lows.
Cooperation between the authorities, private companies, and farmers is essential to help stabilize Yemen's food supply, Mabrouk Hamoud, another farmer, told Xinhua.
Samir al-Hanani, undersecretary for production at the Houthi-run Agriculture Ministry, said a national marketing plan is under way on two tracks.
The first involves building specialized markets capable of managing the marketing process for farmers, which should be developed with private partners. The second is marketing through a contract between growers and specialized marketing companies to guarantee purchase and reduce waste, the official told Xinhua.
"Cold storage is the most important process for serving the crop's marketing," he added.
Al-Hanani also outlined a two-phase agro-processing program: The first will prioritize plants for cotton, sesame, dairy, tomatoes, juices, and multi-crop dryers; the second will expand to additional commodities as investment and capacity grow.
"This is part of the program to localize local processing industries in partnership with the private sector," he said.
Meanwhile, farmers and officials alike said climate variability now collides with war-damaged infrastructure, volatile fuel supply, water scarcity, and the recurrent threat of disease outbreaks such as cholera.
According to a June report from the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, Yemen remains locked in a prolonged political and humanitarian crisis, with millions in both the north and south suffering from acute food insecurity.
More than a decade of war between government forces and the Houthis has devastated infrastructure, and left much of the population dependent on aid.
Despite the headwinds, farmers in Luluwah have not completely lost hope for the future. "The government and private companies need to take climate change seriously," Hamoud said. "A national strategy for local marketing would help stabilize our economy, reduce imports, and move us towards food self-sufficiency."
"We're waiting for things to improve. We still have hope," he added.