Yemeni fishermen turn to artificial reefs to boost fish stock amid civil war and environmental challenges

Rarely has Yemen been a source of positive headlines in the last few years, with the country’s decade-long civil war showing few signs of abating.

However, the ingenious ways that Yemenis are tackling their nation’s myriad environmental issues are starting to receive global attention. The latest novel method to attract notice is artificial reefs or ARs. 

On July 19, The Guardian reported that fishermen were building “DIY” ARs and “boosting fish numbers in Yemen” by sinking firewood, tyres, discarded metal and plastic, and other refuse in the Red Sea.

The resulting structures on the seafloor are meant to replace dying coral reefs and host algae and other marine life on which fish feed. The fishermen then use the ARs as spots to practice their trade and counteract the historical declines in their hauls. 

Though the fishermen’s employment of ARs is just now becoming a topic of discussion outside Yemen, Yemenis have been relying on this technique for generations.

In earlier eras, they used objects from the natural environment to create ARs, such as rocks and trees. The more recent employment of manmade materials — with the potential to exacerbate water pollution — has been the subject of criticism from environmentalists and scholars in Yemen and beyond. 

Other experts warned that ARs comprising slow-dissolving metals and plastics could pollute the water, poison fish and other marine life, and even harm the coral reefs that the ARs are superseding. The pollutants might also return to Yemenis who eat the fish. 

Yet as Yemeni fishermen grow more desperate to supplement their dwindling catch, the practice of constructing ARs seems unlikely to stop.

In December 2023, Arab World Press reported that Yemen’s fish stock had declined from 400 thousand metric tons in 1993 to between 40 and 50 thousand metric tons in 2023. Meanwhile, fishing has become far more dangerous for Yemenis.

Then, in 2021, the war resulted in the deaths of 334 fishermen and prevented more than four out of five from practising their livelihood in an industry that had once employed 2.5 million along the Red Sea. 

In 2002, the fishing industry accounted for 15 percent of Yemen’s gross domestic product according to the Food and Agriculture Organization, or FAO, an affiliate of the United Nations.

By June 2024, though, the FAO put that number at just three percent of Yemen’s conflict-battered GDP, while the fishing industry continued to employ two percent of the workforce. 

These conditions and war-fuelled inflation have contributed to vast fluctuations in the price of fish, with Yemenis staging protests in 2021 as the cost of some fish increased by as much as 400 percent. The authorities have taken some steps to rein in the most immediate problems.

Last February, for example, Yemen’s UN-recognised government — based in the southern port city of Aden — initiated a ban on exports of fish to bolster supplies for the domestic market and thus lower prices, more than halving them in some cases.

Yet a proactive, comprehensive solution appears remote as long as Yemen stays divided between the government in Aden and the Iranian-backed Houthi regime that governs most of the population. And measures like the prohibition of exports further deplete the income of Yemen’s fishermen, forcing them to depend ever more on polluting tools such as ARs. 

The June FAO report noted that the FAO had partnered with the King Salman Humanitarian Aid and Relief Center, an aid agency tied to the Saudi monarchy also known as KSRelief, to rehabilitate four fishing sites off Yemen’s southern and western coasts.

The United States Agency for International Development, better known as USAID, also conducted a study in 2019 meant “to inform strategic thinking on how to design future development programs to rehabilitate the fisheries sector in Yemen, to maximise its potential, improve coastal population livelihood, reduce poverty, and create employment.”

The report offered a range of recommendations for the international community, including the provision of financing and the organization of training for Yemeni fishermen and officials. The report urged upgrades to Yemen’s infrastructure, which has degraded further as the war drags on. 

Because Saudi Arabia and the United States serve as crucial benefactors of the government in Aden, they — and their humanitarian arms, KSRelief and USAID — are in a unique position to support Yemeni fishermen in their time of need.

Until that intervention comes, however, the fishermen will remain dependent on ARs, whatever their long-term cost.