Sec. 2. Findings

348 words·~2 min read·/bill/115/hr/2795/ih/section-2

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Congress finds the following: Yemen, a country that has been plagued by violence and insurgency for many years, has been locked in a devastating civil war since 2015. In April 2017, the World Food Programme announced that Yemen is on the brink of full-scale famine and classified approximately 7,000,000 Yemenis, including 2,200,000 children, as severely food insecure . Although many factors account for the famine conditions in Yemen, including years of government mismanagement, corruption, and natural disasters, the World Food Programme indicates that the impact of the conflict—including the destruction of public services, infrastructure, transport, and Yemen’s economy—is having a significant impact on Yemen’s food insecurity.

According to the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund, a Yemeni child dies every ten minutes, on average, from malnutrition, diarrhea, or respiratory tract infections. Disease, war, and desperate poverty in Yemen threaten United States core values and strategic priorities for combating global terror. According to the January 2014 Worldwide Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community — a [l]ack of adequate food will be a destabilizing factor in countries important to US national security that do not have the financial or technical abilities to solve their internal food security problems ; and [f]ood and nutrition insecurity in weakly governed countries might also provide opportunities for insurgent groups to capitalize on poor conditions, exploit international food aid, and discredit governments for their inability to address basic needs .

Yemen imports 90 percent of its food, a majority of which enters the country through the port of Hodeida, currently a Houthi-controlled city. In response to the August 2015 bombing of the port of Hodeida, the United States Agency for International Development funded, in part, the replacement of port cranes destroyed in the bombing, though the replacements have not been delivered because of current conditions on the ground despite being essential to accelerate the rapid delivery of food from the port.

Relief organizations are concerned that the closure of the port of Hodeida for any reason could further exacerbate famine in Yemen because the majority of humanitarian aid enters the country through that port.