الأزمة الزراعية والبيئية المستمرة في اليمن

 خلال السبعينيات ، مولت المساعدات الخارجية زيادة كبيرة في عدد وحجم مضخات المياه. بدأ اليمنيون في استبدال مصادر الغذاء المحلية ببدائل مستوردة أرخص ، مما حفز التحول من زراعة المواد الغذائية الأساسية إلى محاصيل نقدية أكثر ربحًا. كانت هذه المشاريع مفيدة في تطوير اقتصاد زراعي كثيف استهلاك المياه ساهم في أزمة المياه في اليمن.

تعتمد اليمن الآن على الواردات في 90 في المائة من المواد الغذائية الأساسية. تم التقاط مدى تدهور البنية التحتية اليمنية بشكل لافت للنظر في صور الفيضانات المدمرة في صيف عام 2020 ، والتي تفاقمت بسبب انهيار العديد من السدود. على الرغم من نظام الري المعترف به تاريخيًا في البلاد ، لم يتمكن اليمنيون من التقاط الأمطار الثمينة وكان بإمكانهم فقط التحسر على الدمار الناجم عن وفرته.

(-Author: Asher Orkaby for MERIP.org)

في عام 1998 ، كان عبد الرحمن الإرياني عامل إغاثة شابًا محليًا يشرح الوضع المائي اليائس في تعز ، جنوب العاصمة صنعاء. كانت المياه شحيحة لدرجة أن بعض الأسر كانت تحصل عليها مرة واحدة كل ستة أسابيع.

في عام 2009 ، أصبح الإرياني الآن وزير المياه والبيئة في الحكومة اليمنية ، ولا يزال سكان تعز ينتظرون ستة أسابيع لتدفق المياه من الصنبور ، وفي صنعاء ، تحول الوضع من سيء إلى كارثة تلوح في الأفق.

يقول الإرياني: "نحن في أزمة. وهذا متوقع ... نحن نستخدم ما يقرب من 100 في المائة أكثر من المياه المتجددة السنوية المتوفرة في صنعاء".

شاحنة صهريج حسن الجبوري في مضخة على جانب الطريق على طول أحد الشوارع الرئيسية في صنعاء. يقضي الجبوري وزملاؤه السائقون أيامهم في بيع المياه للفنادق والمطاعم والمنازل الخاصة.

يقول إن الرحلة النموذجية تكلف 1000 ريال ، أو حوالي 5 دولارات. إذا اضطر إلى القيادة لمسافات طويلة ، فقد تكلف أكثر قليلاً.

تعد أزمة المياه في اليمن ، جزئيًا ، نتيجة حتمية للتزايد السريع في عدد السكان ، ومحدودية هطول الأمطار ، ومحدودية الموارد المائية.

ظهرت مجموعات دولية مثل البنك الدولي وصندوق النقد الدولي مع مجموعة من الحوافز لحمل المزارعين على حفر الآبار واستخدام طبقات المياه الجوفية بدلاً من الطريقة القديمة لالتقاط مياه الأمطار.

أنور السهولي هو خبير مياه في مؤسسة التنمية الألمانية ، وهي لاعب رئيسي في جهود إصلاح المياه في اليمن. ويقول إن أكثر من مليون فدان من الأراضي الزراعية التي كانت تُروى بمياه الأمطار تُروى الآن بالمياه الجوفية ، باستخدام طرق غير فعالة تفقد كميات هائلة من المياه للتبخر والتسرب.

يقول: "علينا عكس العملية الآن ، وتعويد الناس على تجميع مياه الأمطار. علينا أن نشجع الحصاد من الفيضانات ، من كل قطرة نحصل عليها ، ووقف حفر أي آبار أخرى".

(Source: https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120619082)

يتسبب نقص الوقود في عام 2019 في تعريض حوالي 230 ألف هكتار من الأراضي الزراعية للخطر ، لا سيما في المناطق الشمالية والغربية من تهامة وصعدة وحجة وإب وتعز والمحويت وأجزاء من محافظات الجوف.

يقول علي عبد الغني المقتري ، باحث زراعي في محافظة تهامة ، إن محاصيل الحبوب في العديد من المناطق قد دمرت لأن المزارعين غير قادرين على تأمين الري الكافي.

وبحسب غيلان ، فقد أدى نقص المياه في بعض حقول الطماطم إلى القضاء على المحاصيل بالكامل ، مع امتداد الضرر أيضًا إلى جذور النباتات.

يمكن رؤية آثار أزمة الوقود بسهولة في الأسواق المحلية حيث ارتفعت أسعار المحاصيل وكان هناك انخفاض غير مسبوق في القوة الشرائية بين السكان المحليين.

(Source: https://www.scidev.net/global/news/yemen-fuel-crisis-takes-heavy-toll-on-agriculture/)

1. وقد أدت المحنة إلى انخفاض الأمن الغذائي بسبب فقدان سبل العيش ، وفي المناطق النائية ، الغذاء من أجل الكفاف.
2. تشمل الدوافع الرئيسية المرتبطة بالنزاع ما يلي: الهجمات المباشرة على المزارع والبنية التحتية الزراعية ، والحرب الاقتصادية واقتصاد الحرب ، مما يحد من الوصول إلى المياه ، والمدخلات الزراعية والأسواق ، وانهيار الحكم.
3. إن الآفاق الفورية قاتمة في مواجهة الجراد والفيضانات والأضرار المتراكمة وفقدان المساعدات الإنسانية المرتبط بـ COVID-19.
4. عندما يسمح الوضع الأمني ، يجب أن تضمن برامج الإنعاش الزراعي أنها مستدامة بيئيًا ، وتوفر زيادة الإنتاجية والأمن الغذائي وسبل العيش الآمنة.

مواقع رصد الجراد وتدخلات المكافحة 2014-2020. تم الحصول على البيانات من منصة Locust Hub ، منظمة الأغذية والزراعة.

https://www.scidev.net/global/news/yemen-fuel-crisis-takes-heavy-toll-on-agriculture/

.مصادر الاستيراد اليمنية: الإمارات والصين هما الشريكان التجاريان الرئيسيان

Reliance on Landlords: From the Colonizers to the Congress Party

Why did India never have a class-based revolution or stark social transformation? In a letter to Engels, Marx suggested that the arrival of British free trade brought the only social revolution in India. He starts by invoking the imagery of the static village-- 

These small stereotype forms of social organism have been to the greater part dissolved, and are disappearing, not so much through the brutal interference of the British tax-gatherer and the British soldier, as to the working of English steam and English free trade. Those family-communities were based on domestic industry, in that peculiar combination of hand-weaving, hands-spinning and hand-tilling agriculture which gave them self-supporting power. English interference having placed the spinner in Lancashire and the weaver in Bengal, or sweeping away both Hindoo spinner and weaver, dissolved these small semi-barbarian, semi-civilized communities, by blowing up their economical basis, and thus produced the greatest, and to speak the truth, the only social revolution ever heard of in Asia.

Tehri village paddy fields, Uttarakhand

But in Reinventing India, Stuart Corbridge and John Harriss have shown that the British left many pre-existing structures, such as the zamindari system or the village caste relations, untouched or even retrenched. Some have suggested that this was their strategy of divide and rule, since it would be to the British rulers’ advantage if supra-village structures were weakened and villages were strengthened. Others have also argued that the British colonizers could have been thinking only in terms of “Western” and “Indian” terms, saw India as a divided society, and strengthened preexisting divides in the process. Anti-colonialism sought to adapt western institutions while also understanding India as distinctly different than Western societies. Spiritual values and private practices can remain “Indian” while the public sphere becomes Western, which created new identities and contradictions. Economics definitely fell under the public sphere and has been a politically contested issue in India throughout the 19th and 20th century.

The authors provided many critiques of the Congress Party-led nationalist movement. Historian Barrington Moore suggested from a Marxian view that Gandhi provided a link between landed classes and peasants through satyagraha and ahimsa movements. Gandhi and his followers advocated for class conciliation while others saw a need for class struggle. But the Congress Socialists were divided and weak and eventually established their own party--CSP.  Therefore even though Jawarhalal Nehru’s position towards socialism was sincere, as Pramit Chaudhuri has pointed out, Nehru did not push for nationalization of land seriously within his own party for the sake of unity. He also felt personal loyalty to Gandhi’s positions. As soon as Congress Party came into rule after independence, according to David Arnold, they have strengthened rulings of the Raj, such as the civil administration and refused the interference of politicians. Some would say that the Congress Party became the Raj to some extent.
Corbridge and Harriss follow Gramsci, Partha Chatterjee and Sudipta Kaviraj’s idea of Nehru’s “passive revolution” to explain developments in the 1950s that substituted any real social revolution. Nehru wanted to uplift the poor through development led by a centralized state. Nehru proposed that top-heavy industrialization could reduce dependence on agriculture. He resisted conservative tendencies in the Party but he did not have the power to institute industrialization as much as countries like South Korea or redistribution of land like China. Furthermore, Nehru’s Congress Party garnered support through regressive taxation, in which the state did not tax rich Indian farmers much. This contributed to Nehru’s inability to implement agrarian reform and contributed to the 1970s’ “crisis of planning.” Due to these demand-side requirements, the state could not raise resources domestically. Used to the many concessions by the state, the New Farmers’ Movement in the 1970s also championed lower input costs such as the reduction of irrigation charges and more subsidies. This arrangement impeded planning and the passive revolution.
Partha Chatterjee and Karivaj identifies Nehruvian ideals as “high modernism” that was distant from popular support. For example, secularism through education was also an alien concept to the broader public. The English-educated elements in Congress Party realized in 1947 that in addition to these ideals, they also had to struggle and compete for local control of party organizations. They gradually lost ground to networks of important individuals with bonds to business patronage.

If nationalism had certain problems, how should we assess India’s (nationalistic) claim that it is the biggest democracy? Ambedkar, social reformer and champion of lower caste rights, criticized the lack of change over the caste-class issue. He posed the contradiction that from 1950, “In politics we will have quality and in social and economic life we will have inequality. In politics we will be recognising the principle of one man, one vote, one value. In our social and economic life we shall, by reason of our social and economic structure, continue to deny the principle of one man, one value.” (p34) Nehru understood democracy from the Raj and Westminister models, which nowadays people consider overly idealistic. Yet at the time mostly everyone in the Constituent Assembly agreed with him to form a centralized Parliamentary constitution rather than something close to the ground, like a panchayati government. Barrington Moore also identified the weak bourgeois class for a functioning participatory democracy in India. Karivaj proposed that due to the weak bourgeois, India requires state bureaucracies for social justice and redistribution. These institutions have been less funded since privatization led by Indira Gandhi and the Indian economists of the 1990s, which Corbridge and Harris criticize in a later chapter.

In an international context, state planning and rule by economic experts were two hegemonic ideas among much of the Third World Nationalists, such as Egypt’s Nasser and India’s Nehru. There was a brief honeymoon period between the Communist leadership and economists in China as well before Mao Tse Tung started movements to purge many intellectuals, economist and others, and consolidate in 1952, 1956-57 and 1966-1976. In India, Congress Party could not execute social justice through land reform and redistribution. Rather, the Party continuously distributed subsidies to rich farmers throughout post-independence. For example, fertilizer subsidies only strengthened the dominating landholding farmers. This strategy was also in line with the “demand side” Keynesian economics that sought to increase spending in the economy. Yet as Beverly Silver has pointed out, the Keynesian prescription was meant for the “developed” countries. High mass consumption and full employment were deemed to be beyond the reach of “underdeveloped” economies. (Silver, Beverly. Forces of Labor, 154.) Only the upper classes in India had money to spend and and rich farmers were taxed regressively. Since the money was not flowing to the state through taxed consumption, the subsidies partly caused the crisis in state finances in the 1980s and 90s. 

Banana tree in village near Rishikesh

Since rich peasants have been one of Congress Party’s main constituents’ interest, and may continue to serve as a powerful constituent of the BJP as well. Rich peasants obtained votes often vertically by coercing their tenants or dominions to vote with the rich's interest, this tendency may continue even as Congress Party support in current elections.  Rupa Viswanath argued in class that the phenomenon in which rich do not vote as much as the poor is because nowadays the rich are confident of their control over rural power. Thus it does not matter which political power is at the center. New taxes would be protested and fended off by the rich peasantry since there was a precedent of low to no taxes. More readings need to be done on the relationship between rural interests and electoral politics.

Leftist Projects and Subaltern Silence | 碧山计划

A lively and important discussion started by Harvard sociology PhD Ms. Zhou Yun critique of the Bishan Jihua (碧山计划) has come to my attention. The Bishan program's initiator Ou Ning (​欧宁) is a rather big name as an art curator and intellectual. Based on what the discussions, it is Ou Ning’s effort to revitalize the village and help them become livelier through civil society. Specific goals elude me as well as the online discussion, but Ou Ning's vision of the ideal village (Bishan) focuses more on the cultural aspect of the locality than the model CCP village development program would. As a result of the program, Bishan village now has a bookstore, a hip bar, and reoccurring cultural + crafts festivals. (The one time I met esteemed sociologist Dr. Yu Jianrong  于建嵘 at a discussion about NGOs, he talked very enthusiastically about his own version of Bishan in Guizhou’s 黔西南).

Bishan Bookstore (碧山书局)
Photo Credits: Ou Ning

Zhou Yun makes some very good points about how the liberal-elite discourse perpetuates the inequality between rural (farmers) and urban elites. She also points that while tourism seems to commodify the rural areas, many residents in rural areas like Bishan with rich cultural endowment would prefer tourism. But I also share the concern of some of the comments below that think 1) she is thinking ahead of herself--if the arrangement of capital doesn't change and farmer continue to be “at the bottom of the economic food chain,” analyzing discourse may not be the best recourse. 2) She is exaggerating the lack of consensus between the locals and Ou Ning based on some impressions. (I would presume that Ou Ning would know more about villages than a hypothetical foreign NGO, such as depicted in Passage to Manhood: Youth Migration, Heroin, and AIDS in Southwest China.) Even if some Bishan residents have no opinion regarding Ou Ning's ambition, she does not acknowledge the existence of local supporters.

One of the sobering comments below (emphasis added):

"Of course, capital and power might destroy the village cultural and ecosystem. But before capital has even reached the village, if one starts to worry about whether [a project] is 'elitist' or 'nativist,' it seems to be akin to worrying about whether the sky will fall. 
Dr. Fei (Hsiao-tung)'s Peasant Life in China: A Field Study of Country Life in the Yangtze Valley still has much relevance today. Because even after one hundred years (since he wrote it), China still is a maiban country: foreigners print money to exploit the (Chinese) city, the city exploits the rural villages, the villages exploit the environment, and the environment cannot speak so it can only be exploited (without question). Right now the question is how to empower the two weakest in along the food chain--the village and environment. There are many ways in regards to how to empower them, and some forms are terrible indeed if viewed from certain angles."

“诚然，资本和权力可能对乡村文化生态可能会带来毁灭性的影响。但在资本没有到位之前，就开始焦虑精英主义还是自然主义，岂不杞人忧天。  费老的《江村经济》在今天依然有现实意义，正是因为一百年后的中国今天依然是买办大国，洋人印钞抢城市，城市抢乡村，乡村抢环境，环境不会说话， 只有被抢。当下如何反哺处于权力链条上最底端的乡村和环境才是重点。如何反哺当然会有各种形式，有些形式可能从某个角度来看可以说是极为糟糕。” 

The larger question presented here is--if the Chinese government does allow for more organizing from the bottom-up (here, “bottom” includes elites such as Ou Ning), are the locals and the public open to leftist / utopian projects such as the the Bishan Jihua? Ou Ning definitely sees a possibility. Then again, I would anticipate a Marxist response being that the rural areas will still have to rely to some extent on consumers from the urban areas, which clearly does not shield them from capitalism (I recall a U-Madison graduate student's point about certain Laos rubber plants’ different modes of production seem to provide good alternatives for their lives, but from a Marxist perspective they still have to function under the same global capitalist system and respond to the global rubber price).  Still, a cultural revival of the rural areas in the popular imagination will definitely benefit the image and subsequently the material conditions of some villages.

It’s also interesting how many participants in this discussion accept the de facto “nongcun” (rural) v. “chengshi” (urban) dual categorizations for people. Politically, these categories are designated by the government; culturally many discussion participants also  distinguish between the two, with the urban is "modernized," while the rural is the "backward" or "marginalized." In reality I think 1) a significant amount of people fall between the two, such as the migrant hair stylists of Fujian or college students with rural backgrounds / hukous, both types which successfully emulate urban sensibilities. 2) There are many different kinds of vested interests and cultural identity within the “urban” or “rural.” 3) The Urban v. Rural category carries both feudal and modern weights, since the hukou system extends beyond the CCP but has been reemphasized and evolved since the CCP. 4) Ethnic minorities would complicate the dualistic picture. I wonder if Zhou Yun would maintain a similar stance regarding the lack of subaltern voices if she were writing about a village in Xinjiang or Tibet. 

All in all, I am glad that this discussion is open and receiving media attention; it seems that at least some Chinese netizens are willing to imagine a more bottom-up approach and aware of leftist projects such as the Bishan Jihua.