by Barbara Miller
The lead article in the International section of the Sunday New York Times was entitled “Thirsty Plant Steals Water in Yemen–Farmers Grow Narcotic: Drought Fuels Conflict.” Lots to attract readers from environmental concerns to drugs and conflict. Three photographs add to the grab. One small image shows qat leaves. A very large image is of a lone Yemeni man standing in a dry and drab scene. A third showings a qat vendor and a customer. An inset map shows how close Yemen is to Somalia, another country in the not-good news.
What about the text of the article? It’s a rambling account that flings causes around like candies from a busted piñata:
–The country’s scarce water is used to feed an addiction
–Drought is killing off Yemen’s food crops so farmers turn to planting qat trees
–The water table is sinking
–Yemen’s poverty and lawlessness make the water problem more severe
–Qat trees are proliferating
–Lack of water is fueling tribal conflicts and insurgencies
–Climate change is deepening the problem
–At the root of the water crisis is rapid population growth
–The Yemeni government supports qat despite its destructive elements
–There is no coordination within the government
The article is little more than a laundry list. It offers no sense of order about the most basic, underlying causes versus intermediate causes or simply correlates. Such writing would not be acceptable to me in an undergraduate term paper.
I know that journalists, in contrast to academic social scientists, are supposed to write in a nonlinear, engaging, conversational style. Which apparently precludes logic and clarity. What does the casual reader take away from this article? That Yemenis are intoxicated, lawless, and constantly having babies?
I do thank the writer for providing some important material three-quarters of the way in:
“For milleniums, Yemen preserved traditions of careful water use. Farmers depended mostly on rainwater collection and shallow wells. In some areas they built dams…But traditional agriculture began to fall apart in the 1960s after Yemen was flooded with cheap foreign grain, which put many farmers out of business. Qat began replacing food crops. and in the late 1960s, motorized drills began to proliferate…”
The rest of the article, however, makes nothing of this information, instead mentioning the government’s irresponsibility and lack of coordination.
I am intrigued by what happened in the 1960s: do any readers know about who supplied the “cheap foreign grain”? What about possible outside influences in earlier times? And is anyone in Yemen, including the World Bank, working to revitalize traditional patterns of water management which are likely to prove more successful than exogenously designed and imposed projects?
Photo, “Khat”, from Flickr via Creative Commons.
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