EU and two UN agencies sign 10 million euro deal to strengthen Yemen’s food systems
Yemen Herald News 
ADEN, Yemen — The European Union, the UN Development Programme and the Food and Agriculture Organization announced a 10 million euro agreement on Thursday to strengthen Yemen’s agricultural food systems.
The package is worth about 11.4 million dollars. It was announced in a statement carried by Saba, Yemen’s state news agency.
The project will run for 42 months. It is called SANABEL.
The full name given in the statement is Enhancing the Sustainability of Food, Agriculture and Natural Resources to Accelerate Business Growth, Economic Resilience and Livelihoods.
The project will work with farmers, companies and local organisations, according to the statement. Its stated aim is to make agricultural value chains stronger, more productive and better connected to markets.
The statement said the project would also create jobs, build more sustainable livelihoods and support economic recovery.
Patrick Simonnet, the European Union’s ambassador to Yemen, said the bloc remained committed to Yemen’s resilience and to sustainable economic recovery.
He said the project brought together the parts needed to turn Yemen’s agricultural potential into lasting economic opportunity.
That ran from climate-smart production and the sustainable management of natural resources through to market capacity, businesses and access to jobs, he said.
The statement did not name the governorates where the project will operate. It did not give a target number of beneficiaries, or say when field work would begin.
The account of the signing rests on the European Union’s own statement, relayed by Saba. Yemen Herald found no independent confirmation of the agreement’s terms published elsewhere.
The statement also carried comments from the UNDP and FAO representatives in Yemen, according to a relay published by Yemen TV. Yemen Herald did not independently verify their names.
Yemen Herald could not establish whether the 10 million euros is new money or drawn from existing European commitments.
Saba did not say where the agreement was signed.
Simonnet presented his credentials to President Rashad al-Alimi, chairman of the Presidential Leadership Council, according to the European External Action Service.
The European Union has paid for rural programmes in Yemen before.
It contributed 40.8 million dollars in 2019 to a second phase of the UN Enhanced Rural Resilience in Yemen Programme, the Food and Agriculture Organization said at the time.
That phase ran for 36 months. It was delivered with the International Labour Organization, the UN Development Programme and the World Food Programme.
It covered the governorates of Hajjah, Hodeidah, Lahj, Abyan, Taiz and Sanaa, and targeted about 735,000 people, according to FAO.
The same four agencies later ran a third phase, known as ERRY III, funded by the European Union and Sweden.
That programme ran from March 2022 to February 2025 across seven governorates, UNDP said, and was managed by UNDP.
It provided emergency employment to more than 3,350 people, 38 percent of them women, according to the agency.
Another 1,200 people, including 519 women, were given business and life skills training under the same programme, UNDP said.
Solar panel systems were installed in Hajjah governorate under that phase.
The European Commission adopted a separate 79 million euro package for Yemen in November 2019.
That package covered health, education, drinking water, sanitation, public revenue collection and spending, waste management and private-sector development, including agri-businesses.
It was intended to reach Yemeni communities through bodies such as local councils, the European External Action Service said at the time.
The European Union has provided more than 1 billion euros in humanitarian aid to Yemen since 2015, according to the European Commission’s humanitarian aid department.
Counting development assistance, the department put the total at almost 1.6 billion euros, of which about 500 million euros was development aid.
Its annual humanitarian allocations were 145.12 million euros in 2023, 125 million euros in 2024 and 120 million euros in 2025.
The 2025 figure included a 40 million euro top-up announced in September that year.
The department organised 13 humanitarian air bridge flights to Yemen in February 2024.
Those figures were published on a Commission page last updated in September 2025.
The UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs said in its 2026 humanitarian needs and response plan, published in March, that more than 22 million people in Yemen need assistance.
The plan put the number of acutely food insecure people at 18.3 million.
More than 2.2 million children under five are acutely malnourished, it said. Of those, 516,157 have severe acute malnutrition.
The plan recorded 5.2 million internally displaced people. It sought 2.16 billion dollars to reach 12 million people.
The agreement was announced as fighting across Yemen intensified.
Al-Alimi announced the start of a military operation to retake Houthi-held territory on 4 October, Arab News and Asharq Al-Awsat reported. The operation has been named Dawn of Yemen.
Government forces took control of the Bab al-Mandab strait, Al Arabiya reported, and the government said an advance toward Sanaa had begun.
The Houthis dispute the government’s account of that advance.
CNN reported on 4 October that Saudi-backed Yemeni forces had attacked Houthi positions near the Red Sea shipping route.
Yemeni military statements have placed the heaviest concentration of operations around Taiz.
Neither the European Union nor the two UN agencies said whether the fighting would affect the project’s rollout.
The statement was issued in Aden, the seat of the internationally recognised government.
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