Yemen was thrown into a downward spiral of rural impoverishment by a combination of irresponsible, short-sighted governance and a reckless global food regime.

Yemen’s food crisis is not different in its nature from other regions of the Arab world and the agrarian south more broadly. However, it is a severe case, hence the warning issued a year ago by the United Nations that Yemen, along with other countries, faces the imminent threat of famines of “biblical proportions.” The mass starvation that has engulfed the country is partly a consequence of the ongoing conflict, especially the economic blockade imposed in 2015. Yet the root causes predate the civil war, as devastating as it has been, and have only been revealed and exacerbated by it. At its core, Yemen’s food emergency is an agrarian and a rural social crisis that has been in the making since the formation of the two republics in the 1960s.

It is difficult to understand how a country of experienced farmers, extensively terraced areas and fertile agricultural valleys could fail to feed itself. In 1955, a mission of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations to Yemen concluded that it was one of the best terraced countries in the world at the time. Indeed, Yemeni farmers are worthy of being described as masters of their particularly harsh environment. The main features of Yemen’s geography and climate are seasonal rains in limited parts of the country and almost no precipitation elsewhere; semidesert coastal plains; western and central steep, rugged highlands of a volcanic mountain massif; and eastern and northeastern arid plateaus and vast deserts, including al-Rub’ al-Khali, literally the “Empty Quarter” — “the largest area of continuous sand in the world.”

But despite the fragility of the Arabian Peninsula’s environment, including its southwestern corner, the ingenuity of Yemeni farmers’ methods has successfully established innovative and truly sustainable systems of agriculture and food production since time immemorial. As it turns out, what has thrown Yemen into a downward spiral of rural marginalization and impoverishment is an insidious alliance between irresponsible, short-sighted governance and a reckless global food regime, one that is obsessed with the bottom line and market value. Together, as Utsa Patnaik and Sam Moyo write in “The Agrarian Question in the Neoliberal Era: Primitive Accumulation and the Peasantry,” they worked to “reinforce the incorporation of the peasantry into volatile world markets and extend land alienation, while increasing import dependence.”

Once Yemen was hooked on “speculative world markets dominated by monopoly finance capital,” the rest of the damage was automatic. In fact, that is how free markets work, if that is what you feed into them. Yemen is a good case in point for malintegration with the global economy and the imposition of unequal agricultural trade at the expense of both food security and sovereignty.