Abstract
This chapter first describes Yemen's pre-1970 agricultural system, before the oil age's regional and global dynamics reworked the country's political ecology. Next, it explains remittances' role in restructuring Yemen, especially its agricultural sector. It then offers a quantitative and qualitative-historical account of Yemen's rising food import dependency. The chapter traces how remittances levered Yemen into an irrigation system that uses motors to withdraw water from aquifers, and shows how higher wages and the qat economy lubricated this shift. It highlights how diesel subsidies have become a catalyst for the degradation of traditional irrigation, a mechanism of rural social differentiation, and a means for society-wide differentiation and the denial of development. The chapter concludes by discussing additional exacerbating factors, including ongoing external aggression, and comments on policies to cease and eventually reverse the social and ecological de-development of Yemen's agricultural system, and the country itself.