Yemeni cabinet reviews food and fuel reserves as Red Sea shipping attacks continue

Spread the Word

Yemen’s cabinet met on Sunday under Prime Minister Shaya Zindani to review the country’s economic position, its humanitarian caseload and the state of public services, with attacks on commercial shipping in the Red Sea dominating much of the discussion. The session brought together ministers to assess how far the government’s contingency arrangements would hold if maritime traffic to Yemeni ports were disrupted further.

Ministers spent a substantial part of the meeting on the recent attacks on merchant vessels. The government attributes those attacks to the Houthi movement and describes them as part of a wider Iranian effort to destabilise the region, a characterisation the Houthis reject. Whatever the motivation behind them, the practical consequence for Yemen is the same: a country that imports the overwhelming majority of its food and fuel cannot afford sustained interference with the shipping lanes that serve it.

That dependence shaped the rest of the agenda. Officials went through the government’s plans for keeping imports moving and for building up strategic reserves of staple goods, particularly wheat and fuel. Ministers agreed that reserves needed to be deepened so that any interruption to supply would not translate immediately into empty markets, and that planning should account for several possible scenarios rather than a single expected one.

Central to the session was an action plan drawn up by the Government Crisis Management Committee, which the prime minister chairs. The plan is intended to do two things at once: coordinate the work of ministries that have often operated separately, and give officials a framework for responding as circumstances change. Zindani told the meeting that the government would adjust its approach in line with directives from the chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council, and that protecting economic stability while shielding households from the consequences of the conflict remained the priority.

The prime minister returned repeatedly to the question of basic goods. Keeping food, fuel and medicine within reach of ordinary Yemenis is the measure by which the government expects to be judged, and it is the area where the pressure is most immediate. Prices have risen sharply over the course of the war, the currency has weakened, and supply chains have been repeatedly interrupted. Each of those problems compounds the others.

Ministers also acknowledged the financial support provided by Saudi Arabia, which the government credits with keeping public finances functioning. Riyadh leads the coalition backing the internationally recognised government, and the cabinet framed continued cooperation as necessary both for immediate budget support and for the state’s longer-term capacity to deliver services. That relationship is not without critics inside Yemen, but the government’s position is that the assistance is indispensable in present conditions.

The scale of the humanitarian problem gives the discussion its weight. The United Nations estimates that 22.3 million people in Yemen need humanitarian assistance and protection in 2026, out of a population of roughly 35 million. Some 18.3 million are acutely food insecure. More than five million people remain displaced inside the country, and over two million children under the age of five are acutely malnourished. Aid agencies have appealed for 2.16 billion dollars to reach 12 million of those in greatest need, and funding has consistently fallen short of what is sought.

Those figures sit behind every line of the government’s economic planning. Collapsed public health provision has allowed diseases that are readily preventable, including cholera and measles, to return in waves. Displacement has stripped families of land and livelihoods. The result is a population with very little capacity to absorb another shock, which is why the cabinet treated the security of shipping routes as an economic and humanitarian question rather than a purely military one.

The attacks on shipping also carry consequences well beyond Yemen’s coastline. The Red Sea is one of the busiest maritime corridors in the world, and disruption there raises freight and insurance costs across a wide range of trade routes. Shipping companies have rerouted vessels around southern Africa at considerable expense, lengthening voyages and adding cost that eventually reaches consumers. For Yemen, the same disruption means higher import prices in a market where households already have almost no margin.

Ministers argued at the meeting that security, economic stability and humanitarian need cannot usefully be separated, and that the government’s response has to treat them as a single problem. In practice that means coordinating ministries that have historically worked in isolation, and matching planning to the resources actually available rather than to what officials would prefer to have.

The obstacles are considerable. The government operates from Aden with limited control over much of the north, including the capital, and it contends with internal divisions among the factions represented on the Presidential Leadership Council as well as with the Houthis. Maintaining a unified position among those factions is itself a demanding piece of political work, and one that has not always succeeded.

Sunday’s meeting produced planning rather than announcements, and none of the measures discussed will resolve the underlying conflict. What it did signal is where the government believes its immediate vulnerabilities lie: in the supply of imported staples, in the state’s ability to pay for services, and in the exposure of a coastline that carries almost everything Yemenis eat. Whether the arrangements reviewed on Sunday prove adequate will depend less on the plans themselves than on whether the shipping lanes stay open.