This report gives an overview not available elsewhere of the impact of the Coalition bombing campaign on food production and distribution in rural Yemen and on fishing along the Red Sea coast. The timing of its release appears opportune. Press coverage of this forgotten war has increased; there is some diplomatic and political movement; and the report on human rights violations during the Yemen war, prepared under the aegis of the Group of Eminent Experts, has been submitted to the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Warnings of the risk of mass starvation echo ever more shrilly.
The paper documents the damage to the resources of food producers (farmers, herders, and fishers) alongside the targeting of food processing, storage and transport in urban areas and the wider economic war. It also argues that there is strong evidence that Coalition strategy has aimed to destroy food production and distribution in the areas under the control of Sanʿaʾ. From the autumn of 2016, economic war has compounded physical destruction to create a mass failure in basic livelihoods.
Deliberate destruction of family farming and artisanal fishing is a war crime. Yemen, Saudi Arabia, the
UAE, the United Kingdom and France are signatories to the 1977 Protocol I additional to the Geneva
Conventions, which gives the fullest statement in International Humanitarian Law on the protection of
objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population
