Qat in the middle

Sometimes I miss the eco-reps of freshman year. I miss the “Green Dorm Room” sign that my roommate and I earned by virtue of living in a non-air conditioned room with a broken radiator. I miss the free, metal water bottles. I miss having a representative vouch for my right to live with paper AND plastic recycling bins in my common room.

Despite all these fond memories, I managed to live an entire year on East Campus, befriending eco-reps, without seeing a single change in sustainability practices at Duke. There are better tasks for the environmental advocate at Duke than telling fellow freshmen, “Make it a quickie! Turn off the tap.” So I have a suggestion for those of you who aren’t ready to be done preaching about Mother Earth: Pack up your water conservation stickers and your enthusiasm and head east about 8,000 miles. Get excited, you’re headed to Yemen!

It seems slightly unfair that a nation plagued by al Qaeda in the south and extremists in the north should also have to worry about turning off the faucet while they brush their teeth. The sad reality of the matter, however, is that Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, is on its way to becoming the first capital in the world to run out of a viable water supply. With 1,200 miles of coastline, desalination plants seem to be a necessary and reasonable solution to desertification. Despite the obvious need, it’s hard to tell one of the poorest and least developed nations in the world that they just need to suck it up and invest over $1 billion in a desalination plant like their wealthy neighbors, the Saudis.

Water scarcity is particularly crippling in a chaotic nation like Yemen. The centralized government of Yemen has been in a state of flux since the departure of Ali Abdullah Saleh in 2012; even during his tenure, the northern and southern regions of the nation maintained their own basic autonomy. Any sort of environmental policy is near impossible to enforce, and education about water issues is somewhere between nonexistent and poor. Beyond the government’s inability to do much about it, water scarcity allows for the perpetuation of the very anarchy and violence that has plagued Yemen in its time as a post-colonial nation. Violence over wells and water sources in the north and south is incredibly common, so rural Yemeni citizens often welcome the order and security that al Qaeda or extremist groups like the Houthis can provide. In some areas of the highlands, water tables can drop between 10 and 20 feet annually. It’s no shocker, then, that these same areas are disproportionately likely to be external to the control of the central government.

So what’s behind this great water crisis? You don’t have to dig very deep to find its root. In line with its level of development, 64 percent of Yemen’s workforce works in agriculture. This sector receives a whopping 90 percent of the domestic water supply and 37 percent irrigates a nonessential crop: qat.

Qat is a mild psychoactive stimulant that is an indelible aspect of daily habits in Yemen. The average Yemeni man chews qat for eight hours a day, spending his afternoon with a bulging cheek, regardless of whether he’s farming, relaxing or in a session of the consultative assembly. The time spent chewing qat and the lackadaisical attitude associated with the activity are often blamed for the backwards and undeveloped nature of Yemen. A Yemeni journalist, Ali Saeed al-Mulaiki, joked prior to the revolution of 2012, “If the Yemeni people didn’t chew qat, they would think about their future and about their lives, and there would be a revolution.”

Despite the fact that qat appears to be an all-around negative for the nation, it doesn’t have an appropriately poor reputation within the country. The ranks of qat-chewers are now expanding to include women, which is sometimes seen as a mark of feminism and progress. Anywhere else, this would be considered the expansion of a nation of addicts—breaking the methamphetamine glass ceiling in the American Midwest was never a triumph of the National Organization for Women.

Like connecting your extra minute in the shower to the extinction of the polar bears, it’s hard to think of your daily bag of qat as a contributing factor to the strength of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. The drug itself isn’t harmful enough to prompt the same treatment as crops like opium, yet the ancillary effects are not discountable. When it comes down to it, qat is a water-intensive crop that earns its cultivators more money than other crops like grains. No blame can be placed on a Yemeni farmer for selecting the more lucrative endeavor, and this pattern will continue unless there is drastic change in qat demand or the management of water in the nation. So eco-reps, unite! There’s some water out there not getting the respect it deserves.