In the years before war and famine upended daily life in Yemen, Mohammed Abdullah Youssef used to sit down after a long day of fasting during Ramadan to a rich spread of food. His family ate meat, falafel, beans, salty fried pastries and occasionally bought creme caramel from the store.
This year, the Islamic holy month looks different for Mr Youssef, 52, a social studies teacher in the coastal town of Al Mukalla. With bread, soup and vegetables they break the fast with his wife and their five children. Earning the equivalent of $66 a month, he frets that his paycheck sometimes slips through his hands in less than two weeks, much of it to pay grocery bills.
“I’m struggling to make ends meet,” Mr. Youssef said in an interview, describing how even before Ramadan he had begun skipping meals to stretch his meager wages, but could barely afford bus tickets to his job in an elementary school.
A decade ago, his salary covered his family’s needs and more. But conflict, poverty and famine have gripped much of Yemen. As rapid inflation eats away at their spending power, middle-class Yemenis like Mr. Youssef have found themselves sliding into financial ruin.
Muslims abstain from food and water between dawn and dusk to observe Ramadan, which is meant to be a time of worship, festive gatherings and nightly celebrations. But it has been a desperate situation this year for many across Yemen. The country is home to one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises, precipitated by a war that began in 2014 that experts warn could be spiraling into deeper destruction.
After two years of relative calm, the conflict in Yemen threatens to escalate again. The Iran-backed Houthi militia, which controls much of the country’s north, has been attacking ships in the Red Sea, calling it a pressure campaign against Israel over its bombing of Gaza. In response, a US-backed coalition is carrying out airstrikes in Yemen – all of which increases the insurance costs of shipping goods to the country, which depends on imports.
More than 18.2 million people out of a population of 35 million now need humanitarian aid, but funding has dwindled as international donors turn their attention to other crises, including the war in Ukraine and the impending famine in Gaza.
In December, the World Food Program suspended food distribution to Houthi-controlled territory, where the vast majority of Yemenis live. The agency, which is run by the United Nations, said the decision stemmed from “limited funding” as well as disagreements with Houthi authorities over reducing the number of people served to focus on the most needy families.
Edem Wosornu, director of operations and advocacy at the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, warned on March 14 that food insecurity and malnutrition in Yemen have increased in recent months. The progress the agency had seen over the past two years was “in danger of falling apart,” he said.
Spring is generally a time of harvest of relative abundance in Yemen, said Peter Hawkins, UNICEF representative in Yemen. But he said he is worried about what will happen in the summer and autumn when the “hungry season” arrives.
Last year, the United Nations sought $4.3 billion to pay for aid operations in Yemen and received less than half from donors. This year, he made a more modest call for $2.7 billion.
“The lack of food today, tomorrow, is not a big problem,” Mr Hawkins said. “It’s the cumulative impact that’s a big problem, because that’s where impoverishment starts to set in.” The biggest concern, he said, was that the international community had not yet met the food aid needs of 2024. “And every day they delay,” he added, “every day it’s going to get worse.”
Yemenis, like Mr. Youssef, divided their lives into periods before and after their country was torn apart by war. Before, he was able to afford special purchases for his family like a whole goat, and could even pay for a trip to Mecca for an Islamic pilgrimage, he said.
Then, in 2014, the Houthis – an armed group with a stronghold in Yemen’s northern mountains – seized a period of political instability to seize the country’s capital, Sana’a. A Saudi-led military coalition, backed by US aid and weapons, launched a bombing campaign in 2015 to try to restore the internationally recognized government. The coalition imposed a de facto naval and air blockade that restricted the flow of food and other goods to Houthi-held territory.
As the war continued for years, hundreds of thousands of people died from violence, starvation and disease. Children starved to death – their emaciated bodies documented in stark photographs published by Western news agencies – and the possibility of a widespread famine loomed.
The Saudi-led coalition eventually faced international pressure to withdraw, and a tentative ceasefire prevailed in 2022. This left the Houthis entrenched in power in the north and the Yemenis in a vacuum of sorts – not peace, but a respite from the worst effects of war. The country’s already fragile economy, however, was decimated.
Mr. Youssef’s salary has technically increased by more than 50 percent since the start of the war, but that increase has disappeared amid inflation as Yemen’s currency becomes increasingly worthless. Dueling central banks in the north and south of the country set different exchange rates and the black market operates in a third. In 2014, it took about 215 Yemeni Rials to equal $1. now that Mr. Youssef lives, it is 1,650.
Al Mukalla is in southern Yemen, nominally controlled by the internationally recognized government. In Houthi-controlled territory, thousands of government employees, including teachers, have not received salaries for years.
As a result, deprivation is a feature of everyday life. Every night, Mr Youssef’s family huddles in one room to sleep because it is the only one with an air conditioning unit to ease the sweltering heat. Even if he could afford another cooling unit, he said, he wouldn’t be able to pay the electricity bill to run it.
“We skipped meals and stopped buying things to maintain our dignity and avoid asking others for money,” he said.
Mohammed Omer Mohammed, a grocery store owner in Al Mukalla for three decades, can see the impact on his shop as purchasing power plummets. Instead of rice, customers buy subsidized bread. He said he has stopped stocking products such as Nutella and high-quality canned tuna because his customers can no longer buy them.
In the evenings, Ramadan shoppers still flock to a bustling city market, where vendors sell hamburgers and fresh fruit. But traders said the trade was not what it used to be. Shoppers stop to ask how much things cost and then don’t buy anything. Buyers haggle relentlessly over the price.
“Every year gets worse than the last,” said Abdullah Badwood, a gold dealer who has found that instead of buying gold, many of his clients want to sell.
This Ramadan has been particularly difficult for Hussein Saeed Awadh, 38, a father of three in Al Mukalla. He earns 55,000 Yemeni riyals a month as an Arabic teacher, a salary now worth less than $35. That disappears in a few days as he pays bills, he said, so in the afternoons he has taken a second job as a street vendor.
Years ago, Mr Awadh’s family broke their Ramadan fast with fresh fruit, pastries and chocolates. Now for their evening meal they have coffee and dates and—because he can’t pay for more expensive meat—they eat tripe soup.
A whole chicken would cost more than 5,000 Yemeni riyals — a tenth of his monthly salary. A kilo of local mangoes would cost 3,000 riyals. imported oranges about 3,500. All this is more than many Yemenis can afford. But it’s not just the food that’s out of reach.
Recently, Mr. Awadh found that his 6-year-old daughter’s teeth were broken because she was not getting enough calcium. A four-pound container of powdered milk costs 14,000 riyals — a full week’s salary as a teacher.
“The doctor prescribed medicine and told me to give her milk,” he said. “But I can’t afford it.”
