Yemen’s Ministry of Industry and Trade (MIT) has said it wants to achieve food security by way of a new plan that would also enable it to cope with current soaring food prices.
"The strategic plan would help us be prepared for any food crisis by organising our capacity to deal with the food crisis," Mohammed al-Himiari, adviser for food security affairs at MIT, told IRIN. He added that part of the plan was for the government to establish grain silos to store food stock for at least six months.
A number of ministries and government bodies will participate in drawing up the plan.
Al-Himiari said that a national symposium was held in May by his ministry to discuss the rise in global food prices and to garner participants' views on a plan for food security.
"Through the symposium we wanted to have an outline of the plan, and after that we will engage in drafting the plan," he said, adding that it would then have to be approved by parliament.
Food challenges
Although it is difficult to assess the state of the country’s food security situation because of a lack of indicators, experts say Yemen faces a lot of challenges in this area. These include land degradation, water shortages, low investment in the agriculture sector, increasing cultivation of qat (a mild narcotic that needs a lot of water to grow), and population growth.
The World Food Programme (WFP) placed Yemen among 30 countries most affected by food price hikes worldwide. Yemen also ranked 153rd out of 177 countries on the UN Development Programme’s [UNDP] 2007-08 Human Development Index, making it one of the poorest countries in the world.
In a working paper presented at the May symposium, WFP said Yemen has witnessed a severe crisis in grains due to the high prices at the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008. “This caused the first food security’s pillar [the availability of food] to strongly shake and caused Yemen to fall within the countries that suffer from lack of food security,” it said.
WFP’s paper encouraged Yemen’s government to set up grain silos in order to counter a monopolisation of the market and to fix food prices. WFP further noted that soaring prices of food staples had led to US$28 million deficit in its budget, which would deprive 320,000 people from its food assistance.
MIT, for its part, said food price rises were fuelled by a rise in transportation costs. It said the cost of transporting wheat from the US to Yemen, for example, had increased from US$58 per tonne to US$140 during 2007.
In 2007, Yemen produced 149,000 tonnes of wheat and imported 2,799,000 tonnes. This compared to 1,662,777 tonnes of wheat imported in 2001, according to MIT. Rice imports increased from 194,999 tonnes in 2005 to 860,000 tonnes in 2007.
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