Mint Press News - During a briefing, the UN warned that millions more Yemeni civilians are expected to starve to death before year’s end as a result of a blockade imposed on the country by the Saudi Arabia-led coalition. The Saudis’ unsuccessful bid to quash the Houthi-led resistance movement against Western and Saudi imperialism in Yemen has already claimed the lives of thousands of civilians and transformed the country into the world’s worst humanitarian crisis since the war began in 2015.
Mark Lowcock, the UN’s emergency relief coordinator, expressed his concern regarding the “recent decline of commercial food imports through the Red Sea ports” — adding that, if conditions do not improve, the number of Yemenis at the brink of starvation would rise from the current figure of 8.4 million to 18.4 million by this December. Given that there are approximately 28 million people in Yemen, a continuation of the Saudi-led blockade would mean that nearly two-thirds of the entire country’s population will soon face starvation.
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John Boyd Orr, former director of the Food and Agriculture Organisation, was candid in stating: ‘a world of peace and friendship, a world with the plenty which modern science had made possible was a great ideal. But those in power had
no patience with such an ideal. They said it was not practical politics’ (Daily Herald, 29 July 1948).
What Lord Boyd Orr failed to recognise - and his counterparts today - is that food, like every other commodity in our modern world, is produced primarily for profit, as this headline from Asia Times (31 October) attests:
'In Yemen, plenty of food but few have the cash to buy it'.
And:
'While agriculture and food distribution suffer from the war, food remains available in markets across the country - but few can afford it. "All kinds of food and other items are available in the market. The problem is not a shortage of food in markets but that we do not have money to buy food that is now expensive," Sofi said' (Middle East Eye, 9 November).
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