Between the mountains of southern Yemen, the noise of electric saws tears through the calm of a lush landscape, the wood of the trees becoming an alternative source of energy for a population confronted with one of the worst humanitarian tragedies in the world.
The poorest country on the Arabian Peninsula, Yemen has not been spared from global inflation and rising energy prices, even though it remains largely cut off from the world due to the war that has been going on for more than eight years the pro-government forces to Houthi rebels, close to Iran.
Later turned loggers, Hussein Abdelqaoui and his colleagues pile up sections of freshly felled trees in a forest then throw them in the back of a van on the outskirts of Taiz, a southern city besieged by the Houthis but still controlled by the government, backed by neighboring Saudi Arabia.
This conflict, which has left hundreds of thousands dead and millions displaced, has also devastated an already very fragile economy, plunging a large part of the approximately 30 million Yemenis into serious precariousness.
Many are also struggling to feed themselves, a situation close to famine, according to NGOs.
And with the rise in energy prices since the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, heating is more and more difficult.
“We started cutting down trees and selling them because we have no other means of subsistence,” confirms Hussein Abdelqaoui to AFP.
Cutting down trees in Yemen is still a “catastrophe” for the country, he regrets. “But we have no choice, we sell them”, and people “have no choice and buy them”.
In front of the Abdelsalam Dabwan bakery, in the Taiz shopping center, trunks and branches of trees are piled up. They will be burned in the ovens to bake bread, an essential food for the poorest families in Yemen.
While his employees are busy taking small loaves and pancakes out of the oven where twigs crackle, the baker confides that he had to resort to using wood because of the “incredible increase in the price” of gas and other fuels.
Failing this, it would be obliged to pass on the rise in the cost of energy to the price of bread, which would increase the bill for a population which is already “suffering” from inflation.
“We use wood to give people what they need,” says the baker, who calls on the government to support traders.
According to official figures, more than six million trees have been cut down since the start of the war, including a tenth in Sanaa alone, where they are widely used by bakeries and restaurants, Anouar Al- Chazli, a natural resource management expert working for the Yemeni authorities.
“Logging exists in all countries but in a regulated and adequate way”, which is not the case in Yemen, underlines the specialist.
In the country, especially in Taiz, trees are cut “at ground level, which affects groundwater, agricultural systems and biodiversity while contributing to soil erosion”, he regrets.
The authorities must intervene, he warns, by preventing these “anarchic” fellings and by teaching amateur loggers to cut the trees in an “adequate” way to damage the vegetation as little as possible.
If this convinced environmentalist says he understands the distress of the population in the face of inflation and the economic consequences of the war, he considers it urgent that Yemen acts to prevent the “natural disasters that will befall the country”.
02/26/2023 07:45:10 – Taëz (Yemen) (AFP) – © 2023 AFP
