UN Report: the Saudi-led coalition pushes 79% of Yemeni People below Poverty Line

YemenExtra

Y.A

Yemen will become the poorest country in the world if its conflict goes on through 2022, a new report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) projects. Since 2014, war has driven poverty in Yemen from 47 percent of the population to a projected 75 percent by the end of 2019. If fighting continues through 2022, Yemen will rank as the poorest country in the world, with 79 percent of the population living under the poverty line and 65 percent classified as extremely poor, the report.

The report said that in the absence of conflict Yemen could have made progress toward achieving the SDGs, the global anti-poverty framework agreed in 2015 with a target date of 2030. But more than four years of fighting has set back human development by 21 years—and Yemen would be unlikely to achieve any of the SDGs even if the war were to stop today. Using cutting-edge data modeling and open-source information, the report finds that Yemen’s war will have more than tripled the proportion of the population living in extreme poverty if fighting persists. It will skyrocket from 19 percent of the population in 2014 to a projected 65 percent in 2022.

In the absence of conflict, Yemen could have made progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, the global framework for combating poverty agreed in 2015 with the target date of 2030, the report said.

“But more than four years of fighting have hampered human development for 21 years, and Yemen is unlikely to achieve any of the SDGs even if the war stops today,” the report added.

The report predicted that by 2022 Yemen would suffer from the largest poverty gap in the world (the distance between the average income and the poverty line).

UNDP’s report attributed the high poverty rate in Yemen to factors related to the ongoing war, including the collapse of the economy in which the country has lost $ 89 billion of its economic activity since 2015.

“This report is a reminder that Yemen cannot afford to wait. We must act now,” Ambassador Jürgen Schulz, Deputy Permanent Representative of Germany to the United Nations, said. “Without a political solution, we will see Yemen disappear right before our eyes. That’s why there is no alternative to the efforts of Special Envoy Martin Griffiths to advance an inclusive political process.”

More than 80 percent of Yemen’s roughly 30 million people now require humanitarian assistance and protection. The report launched today argues that if Yemen remains at war through 2030, the costs will be borne by generations to come, with poverty seeding ever more deeply, institutions decimated, and Yemen more vulnerable to an ongoing and vicious cycle of conflict and suffering.

In March 2015, the US -backed –Saudi-led coalition started  a war against Yemen with the declared aim of crushing the Houthi Ansarullah movement, who had taken over from the staunch Riyadh ally and fugitive former president Abd Rabbuh Mansur Hadi, while also seeking to secure the Saudi border with its southern neighbor. Three years and over 600,000 dead and injured Yemeni people and  prevented the patients from travelling abroad for treatment and blocked the entry of medicine into the war-torn country, the war has yielded little to that effect.

Despite the coalition claims that it is bombing the positions of the Ansarullah fighters, Saudi bombers are flattening residential areas and civilian infrastructures.

More than 2,200 others have died of cholera, and the crisis has triggered what the United Nations has described as the world’s worst humanitarian disaster.

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