Center for a New American Security

The trick with bad news in Washington is to release it on Friday afternoon so no one notices. That's the idea behind a new paper I wrote with Richard Fontaine on Yemen. Combined with Yezid's recent paper on SSR in Lebanon, Palestine and Yemen, this should make for some cheery weekend reading.

In the coming decades, Yemen will suffer three negative trends – one economic, one demographic, and one environmental. Economically, Yemen depends heavily on oil production. Yet analysts predict that its petroleum output, already down from 460,000 barrels a day in 2002 to between 300,000 and 350,000 barrels in 2007 and down 12 percent in 2007 alone, will fall to zero by 2017. The government, which receives the vast majority of its revenue from taxes on oil production, has conducted virtually no planning for its post-oil future. Demographically, Yemen’s population – already the poorest on the Arabian Peninsula with an unemployment rate of 40 percent – is expected to double by 2035. An incredible 45 percent of Yemen’s population is under the age of 15. Environmentally, this large population will soon exhaust Yemen’s ground water resources. Given that a full 90 percent of Yemen’s water is used in highly inefficient agricultural projects, this trend portends disaster.

Now go drink heavily.

Yezid Sayigh, to whom this blogger owes both a dissertation chapter as well as an interim progress report, has a new white paper out from the Carnegie Institute on secutiry sector reform (SSR) in Palestine, Lebanon and Yemen (.pdf). Considering Yezid's background, the section on the Palestinian Territories will be especially worth reading.