Cultivating an Equitable Recovery: A Political Ecology Approach to Agricultural Interventions in Yemen

It examines and evaluates recent, current, and planned projects developed by international agencies in terms of their consideration of political-ecological factors, and offers recommendations for donors and policymakers, aid agencies and practitioners, conflict negotiators and observers, and agriculture experts and actors. [...] Lichtenthäler’s Political Ecology and the Role of Water in Yemen[12] examines water resource management in the Sa’ada basin using political ecology, framing environmental problems as fundamentally a confluence of the “political and economic context within which they are created,”[13] and not simply the result of a race to consume scarce resources. [...] One of the biggest impacts on agriculture and rural life in Yemen was the outflow of migrants from the Yemeni countryside to Gulf countries.[24] In 1980, remittances sent home by these workers constituted 40 percent of the gross national product of the Yemen Arab Republic (YAR) and 44 percent of the People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen [19] Max Ajl, “Yemen’s Agricultural World: Crisis and Prospec. [...] The discovery of oil in 1984 further changed the political economies of the YAR and the PDRY and accelerated modernization of the agriculture sector. [...] For example, the Yemen Food Security Response and Resilience Project (FSSRP) – a four-year US$127 million project funded by the World Bank and managed by the UN Development Programme (UNDP), the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), and WFP – includes several highly relevant activities, including rehabilitation and maintenance of terraces, rain harvesting installations, and “economically-enviro.