Yemen: Victim of the Green Revolution

One of the lead stories in the Sunday New York Times international section was titled “Thirsty Plant Dries Out Yemen.” It was about the cultivation of qat, a mildly narcotic plant that most Yemeni, both men and women, imbibe on a daily basis.

Yemen, the author notes in an aside, is a major provider of foot soldiers for Al Qaeda, and the implication is that Yemen’s deteriorating economy and environment, along with the scourge of drug use, is providing fertile ground for Al Qaeda recruiters.

True enough, but reading further into the article, we find the following deeper roots for Yemen’s current predicament:

“For millenniums, Yemen preserved traditions of careful water use. Farmers depended mostly on rainwater collection and shallow wells. In some areas they built dams, including the great Marib dam in northern Yemen, which lasted for more than 1,000 years until it collapsed in the sixth century A.D…But traditional agriculture began to fall apart in the 1960s after Yemen was flooded with cheap foreign grain, which put many farmers out of business. Qat began replacing food crops, and in the late 1960s, motorized drills began to proliferate, allowing farmers and villagers to pump water from underground aquifers much faster than it could be replaced through natural processes. The number of drills has only grown since they were outlawed in 2002.”

Proponents of neoliberal economic theory, with its emphasis on free trade and promoting the use of industrialized processes over traditional ones, often cite the “Green Revolution” of the 1960s as an unqualified success. The expansion of plantation style agriculture and the wide use of pesticides and herbicides, tractors, irrigation ditches, and single-crop plantings supposedly brought prosperity to the Third World.

Yemen, however, is an example of what went wrong. Traditional Yemeni farmers who had relied on rainwater collection and water conservation, who had grown drought tolerant plants to feed the population, were put out of business by cheap, imported grain. The only crop they could grow and make money from was qat. Qat, however, requires a lot of water. And so we have another example of the disastrous results of the Green Revolution.

Ironically, the World Bank is now trying to reintroduces drip irrigation and rainwater collection in Yemen, along with the cultivation of drought tolerant plants, but it’s an uphill struggle. We should keep in mind that it’s easier to preserve traditional agricultural practices than to reintroduce them after they’ve been decimated by the ravages of the free market.

And we should remember Yemen’s problems when big agribusiness companies like Monsanto point to the Green Revolution as a good reason for developing and releasing genetically-engineered crops into the environment without proper testing. While the Green Revolution may have been a bonanza for Monsanto, it has brought environmental destruction, poverty, drug use, and—as we now know—has contributed to the rise of Al Qaeda.

Source: “Thirsty Plant Dries Out Yemen,” Bryan Denton, New York Times, Sunday, 11/1/09.