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Yemen is one of the countries with the worst food crisis in the world
Photo: Giles Clarke / Getty Images
Yemen's popular drug grows on a shrub and has a similar effect to amphetamine: Whoever chews khat leaves calms down, becomes euphoric, after a few hours of chewing users feel full of energy - even the military and militias in the civil war country are making a coup with khat.
Khat also curbs appetite - according to Italian journalist and filmmaker Laura Silvia Battaglia, the drug is now spreading across the country as a substitute for food.
"Many people have nothing to eat because most of the food is imported and they have no jobs and no money, but khat bushes are everywhere or the drug is cheap to buy," observes Battaglia, who made the documentary "Yemen, despite the War «(Yemen, apart from the war) turned about the conflict and lived there for a long time.
"Everyone is chewing now - even children take drugs because they are hungry." Sometimes the youngest are only four years old.
Yemen has always been the poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula, but the situation has deteriorated dramatically since the outbreak of civil war in 2014: For seven years there has been a war between President Abd Rabbo Mansur Hadi and Shiite troops, which are supported by Saudi Arabia and other states Houthi rebels that Iran is behind - and one of the worst food crises in the world.
"The hunger situation is very serious, there is a threat of famine in 2021," warns Welthungerhilfe in its Global Hunger Index 2021, which it published this Wednesday together with the aid organization Concern Worldwide.
"All of the GHI indicators in Yemen are worrying."
Welthungerhilfe also warns against going backwards in the fight against hunger: "The three most devastating hunger drivers, conflicts, climate change and the Covid-19 pandemic threaten any progress made in recent years," the report says.
In almost 50 countries the organization classifies the hunger situation as serious, very serious or serious - accordingly, one country, Somalia, is in a serious hunger situation.
In the five countries of the Central African Republic, Chad, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Madagascar and Yemen, the hunger situation is very serious;
in four other countries - Burundi, Comoros, South Sudan and Syria - it is rated as very serious for the time being.
And the World Food Program warns that 41 million people around the world are on the verge of famine.
According to the UN, 20 million people in Yemen are dependent on humanitarian aid, around two thirds of the population. More than five million citizens are on the verge of famine, while tens of thousands are already suffering from starvation-like conditions. According to the World Food Program (WFP), 400,000 malnourished children could die in Yemen this year "if there is no urgent intervention." The child mortality rate is already 5.8 percent.
She immediately sees the malnutrition of the children who Bushra Aldukhainah encounters in Yemen while spending food and other aid projects. The hair would look yellow and its growth would be disturbed. "If you ask a child how old they are, they'll tell you they're ten or eleven years old," says Aldukhainah, who works for the NGO Care International. "But it barely looks like six."
More than 400 care employees are currently working in Yemen. For Aldukhainah and her team it is a dilemma to select those in need in Yemeni communities who receive food, vouchers or cash from Care International: "Because almost everyone is in need now." Officials and employees of the government have also slipped into poverty - because their salaries have not been paid for years. The need intensified again during the pandemic.
Worldwide, food prices have risen in the pandemic, including in Yemen. In the north of the country, according to Aldukhainah, a sack of flour cost 2500 Yemen rials before the corona crisis, the equivalent of around 8.50 euros. Meanwhile, the price is the equivalent of more than 60 euros; in the south the price increases are even more extreme. The background to the price boom is also an economic and financial war between the government and the rebels, which in some regions led to severe inflation in some regions.
Most people in the country also have no access to clean drinking water. Women and children usually have to fetch water - they often run with canisters to a water source for at least four hours and then drag it back home. They are not only threatened with dangers such as explosives, air strikes or sexual violence on the way; They fetch the water from unsecured water holes or open wells, which, according to Aldukhainah, are often more than 15 meters deep - it happens again and again that children and women fall and drown while fetching water.
Dirty water, a lack of sanitation and destroyed hospitals also led to the outbreak of a cholera epidemic during the conflict in Yemen, and hundreds of thousands fell ill. Care International has installed water storage and washing facilities in some cities, paved water points so that they are safer and easier to access, or is rebuilding markets together with local communities. But all these measures seem like a drop in the ocean as long as the conflict in the country is not resolved.
Because hunger and limited access to food and water are not just a consequence of the war in Yemen - they are a weapon of war. The Yemeni human rights organization Mwatana and legal experts from Global Rights Compliance accuse all parties to the conflict of deliberately using hunger as a »method of warfare«. They had "deprived the civilian population of vital resources and starved them, in some cases to the point of death," according to their report "Starvation Makers" published in September 2021. The goal: to weaken the opposing side.
The air strikes by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition not only attacked hospitals, roads and bridges, but also destroyed or damaged farms and land, livestock, food, fishing boats and fishing equipment, markets, drinking water supplies and irrigation systems.
Since 2015, the coalition led by Saudi Arabia has also imposed sea and air blockades, which restrict the supply of food, fuel and medicine to the civilian population.
But the Houthi rebels have also denied humanitarian organizations access to regions, diverted aid supplies and money to support the population for their war chests - the World Food Program WFP has in the meantime even been forced to stop spending on food.
The civilian population pays the price, often with their own lives. According to doctor Masha Pastrana Durasievich, malnutrition is "nothing new in Yemen" - but since last year the number of malnourished patients has gradually increased. "Almost every day, severely malnourished children come to our medical facilities, which we stabilize in the emergency room with life-saving measures," says Durasievich, who works in Yemen as the medical coordinator for Doctors Without Borders.
The children are often completely weakened and struggle with diarrhea, pneumonia or blood poisoning.
The mothers are also often malnourished and do not have enough breast milk to breastfeed their children - since, as they told the doctor, they often only fed themselves on bread and tea with a little sugar.
Then there are the Covid-19 patients.
"What we see is only the tip of the iceberg," believes Durasievich.
Because in the twelve hospitals that the organization supports on site, they mainly deal with emergencies.
Doctors currently have no access to many communities due to the fighting;
moreover, most people only come to the hospital when their condition is "extremely critical" - "sometimes there is not much more you can do".
Many patients simply cannot afford transportation;
the fuel crisis is preventing citizens and even hospital workers from coming to work.
And that is why the machines and lights sometimes fail in some hospitals.
And an end to the conflict in Yemen is not in sight;
the peace talks taking place in Oman are slow.
Battaglia warns that Yemen needs solutions quickly - generations have already been lost.
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