Water crisis in Yemen by America Abroad

Perhaps the most dire water crisis in the Arab world is in the Republic of Yemen, one of the poorest nations in the region. Joseph Braude talks with the country’s former minister of water and the environment.

Yemen, one of the poorest countries in the Arab world, long fraught by civil war and jihadist groups, is rapidly approaching a water emergency. The World Health Organization defines “extreme water poverty” as a supply below 1000 cubic meters per capital.

In Yemen, says Muhammad Lutf al-Uryani, Yemen’s former minister of water and the environment, it is substantially less.

“I think it’s around 120 cubic meters per year. This is diminishing because of population growth. This is actually around 10% of the world’s average. [It’s] less than 8% of what’s the requirements [are] for food and drinking, in terms of how much a person needs water for producing food.”

The country’s weak central government – often classified as a “failing state” – has been hard pressed to manage the crisis. In the Yemeni capital of San’a, where ground water is all but depleted, farmers have been digging their own wells to suck out the little that remains. It isn’t enough.

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