Over the years many popular magazines have published articles by visitors to Palestine. In a 1919 issue of the periodical The Century there was an article by Joseph Koven, an American Jewish author who visited Palestine. His article is very Orientalist, describing the local Arabs as dressed in rags and primitive. I cannot recommend reading the actual article, but there are several photographs and I attach two of those here.
In a non-academic website called Atlas Obscura, there is an article with the entertaining title: “Before Drinking Coffee, People Washed Their Hands With It.” The article was written by Nawal Nasrallah, an Iraqi scholar who has published excellent work on classical Arabic recipe books. However, this particular article is anything but sound scholarship. Her main argument is that a “mysterious ingredient” very similar to coffee was known five centuries before the documented appearance of coffee, known in Arabic as “bunn“, as a drink. “However, instead of bunn, it was called bunk, and rather than drinking this ingredient, it was mostly used for cleaning and freshening the hands,” she argues.
Her argument is flawed from the start. She is aware that the 9th century Ibn Masawayh defined bunk as an aromatic coming to Iraq from Yemen. He clearly identifies it as coming from the trunk wood of a plant called Umm Ghaylan. However, Nasrallah says Ibn Masawayh was confused, without indicating why. The link to the wood of Umm Ghaylan is also made by al-B’iruni, who adds that it is a Persian term, and by other scholars. Umm Ghaylan is a well-known name for a species of acacia grown on the Arabian Peninsula. Nasrallah was unaware that the renowned botanical scholar Abu Hanifa al-Dinawari, a contemporary of Ibn Masawayh, described Umm Ghaylan as a synonym for talh, the well known term for several acacia species, including the major gum arabic variety. Al-Dinawari also noted the terms for the parts of the tree, specifically defining bunk as the bark (laha) of the acacia tree. This term for bark is still in use in Saudi Arabia. So unless these early scholars were making it up, which I doubt, the meaning of bunk is clearly established. The claim that a 16th century traveler named Leonhard Rauwolf said that the coffee beans he saw being roasted (he never saw the tree) were the same as the term bunk used centuries earlier is hardly reliable proof, especially since Rauwolf assumed that the term bunn for coffee was no different than the earlier term bunk. It was not unusual for writers at this time to make such claims without any real evidence.
Nasrallah writes that early medical scholars like al-Razi and Ibn Sina describe the qualities of bunk “to check the unpleasant odors of sweat and the smell of the quick-lime used in baths to remove hair,” but no mention is made of it as a drink. It is a serious stretch of logic to suggest, as the author does, that when Ibn Sina said that “consuming bunk had mind-altering properties, ‘which could affect the intellect,’” this was proof that this was the first time anyone had pointed out the impact of caffeine. It is not unusual for herbals to comment on the impact of certain substances on the mind, so such a general statement does not imply caffeine from coffee.
In addition to ignoring the clear identification of the plant, which is not mysterious at all, Nasrallah can cite no evidence from Yemen for such an identification. If the coffee plant was indeed coming from Yemen in the 9th century, why is there no reference in any Yemeni text to it? The geographical text of the 9th century al-Hamdani mentions numerous plants, but not any known term for coffee, nor the term bunk. Nor do the agricultural and medicinal treatises of the Rasulid era (13th-15th centuries) refer to coffee. The known documented sources suggest that coffee came from Ethiopia as a drink useful for Sufis; this was probably sometime in the latter half of the 15th century. By 1500 it had spread widely from Yemen and even prompted a legal meeting in 1511 to determine if it was licit for Muslims, as discussed in an article by the historian Jon Mandaville.
The speculation continues with the following claim: “As for coffee as a hand-cleaning product, it seems that the spread of good-quality colored and perfumed soaps eclipsed its popularity. As bunk itself faded away, so did the knowledge of what it was used for.” To suggest that by the 16th century no one used traditional plant products for aromatics or for hand washing is ridiculous, as such practices have continued into the last century. To assume that perfumed soaps were widely available among a population that was still mainly rural and poor is silly. To think that the drinking of coffee took off after several centuries of hand-washing is wishful thinking. There is no evidence at all that the term bunk, which is not related to the coffee term bunn, ever referred to anything other than a product of the acacia tree. To argue otherwise is pure bunk.
My podcast with Ahmed AlMaazmi and Tamara Fernando is posted online on the New Books Network.
The early major civilizations in the Middle East and Asia with their head start several millennia ago had one thing in common: an agricultural base that fed not only people but led to development of states and their services. Major river systems like the Nile and Tigris/ Euphrates, the Ganges of India and the Yellow of China were important centers for mass production, but at the same time small-scale farmers utilized a variety of water sources or practiced dry farming in a variety of ecozones across continents. Although there were periodic famines due to climate variability or political violence, until the start of the last century many countries were able to grow most of the food needed for their citizens and several were major exporters.
In 1798 Parson Thomas Malthus, an economist in his day, suggested that humanity faced a major food crisis. At that time the world population was around one billion; today it is closing in on eight billion. Malthus argued that population growth, if unchecked, grew at a geometric rate over time, but food production increased only arithmatically; thus it was inevitable that there would be food shortages, especially for the poor. At the time Malthus was unaware of later advances in agricultural technology, but his warning still serves a purpose. There needs to be a way to ensure that any form of food production is sustainable. The so-called "Green Revolution" that prophesied major dams and irrigation schemes as the wave of the future has indeed been a wave, but far more destructive to the environment and local agricultural traditions than anticipated.
If we are to recalibrate the model of Malthus today, it is less a mathematical issue than a bureaucratic one fueled by monopolistic profit making. In the United States about half of all family-owned farms are considered small-scale, but they generate only 21% of production. There has been a general decline in the number of farms in the U.S. from a high of 6.8 million in 1935 to about 2 million in 2021. The problem is even grimmer outside the industrialized West, where overall crop diversity has declined by 75% in a century, in large part due to the domination of commercial seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Not surprisingly the need for food aid has grown in recent years.
The case of Yemen has become a poster child for food aid since the humanitarian crisis began in a war that started in 2015. As noted by the World Food ProgramThe current level of hunger in Yemen is unprecedented and is causing severe hardship for millions of people. Despite ongoing humanitarian assistance, 17.4 million Yemenis are food insecure. The number of food insecure people is projected to go up to 19 million by December 2022.
The rate of child malnutrition is one of the highest in the world and the nutrition situation continues to deteriorate. A recent survey showed that almost one third of families have gaps in their diets, and hardly ever consume foods like pulses, vegetables, fruit, dairy products or meat. Malnutrition rates among women and children in Yemen remain among the highest in the world, with 1.3 million pregnant or breastfeeding women and 2.2 million children under 5 requiring treatment for acute malnutrition.
Historically, the rich and fertile land of Yemen, stemming back three millennia to the ancient kingdom of Sheba (Saba), was the bread basket of Arabia. During the 13th century, for example, Yemen boasted diverse crop production from the hot and dry Red Sea Coast to cultivated mountain terraces at the highest point on the Arabian Peninsula. One of the ruling sultans, al-Malik al-Ashraf Umar, interviewed local farmers and wrote a major treatise of the agriculture practiced in Yemen in his time. There were, of course, periodic famines, but overall Yemeni farmers were able to feed themselves and export grain north to Mecca. After the civil war in the 1960s toppled the long-lasting Zaydi imamate, the resulting republic in Yemen’s north received major development aid for improvement of agriculture, but most of this had limited impact at the local level. As the population grew, from less than seven million in 1976 to now reaching 30 million, and unregulated drilling of tubewells drew down aquifers drastically, food production has declined precipitously. There is still fertile land and Yemen’s limited water resources can be used in a sustainable manner, but the ongoing war has ground the economy to a virtual halt. Farmers are still growing food, but it is not clear how much. The fact remains that without imported food aid, there would be a massive famine.
While there is little choice not to send massive amounts of food aid to Yemen to meet the emergency, there is also an urgent need to revitalize the rich agricultural production systems of Yemen, many of which rely on dry farming techniques developed over centuries. Current violent conflict makes such an emphasis difficult, but there are opportunities to work with local Yemeni communities and NGOs. The need is not for foreign technical know-how, an approach that has been ineffective and a waste of funding, but to assist Yemenis in rebuilding terrace walls and using their own seeds, especially for food crops like sorghum which grow well at most elevations. Without contributing to Yemen’s food sovereignty, the ability of Yemeni farmers to grow their own food in harmony with the environmental constraints and not overly dependent on foreign inputs, food aid is a bandage on a gaping wound.
One of the main contributors to the decline in traditional varieties of seeds and crops around the world is the corporate monstrosity previously known as Monsanto. Fortunately, Monsanto with its GMO push never made inroads in Yemen, but the results have been negative elsewhere. The destruction from its pesticides and control of seeds has been known for over two decades. The negative impact has been especially hard in India, which the film Bitter Seeds explores. By pushing GMO seeds, especially cotton, that turned out to be problematic and an economic burden, farmers were locked into dependence on imported seeds and this led to a decline in the local seed varieties, many of which were well suited to local environments after centuries of use. The fact that major aid donors such as the World Bank have pushed GMO seeds despite the enormous economic and bureaucratic burdens these impose on developing nations, has reduced rather than aided food production, especially given the focus on cotton. Regardless of the negative health impact of GMO foods, the overriding issue is saddling local small-scale farmers worldwide with expensive, imported production needs and has devastated locally adapted crop varieties.
Anthropologist Joeva Sean Rock has just published an ethnographic study entitled We are not Starving: The Struggle for Food Sovereignty in Ghana. He shows that despite the promise of improved cotton varieties, the results were far less promising and actually disrupted local food production, which has been predominantly small-holder. In addition, by talking to Ghanian farmers and activists, he realized that the food aid providers started with the assumption that local farmers did not know how best to farm and they needed foreign assistance or they would starve. Instead of working with farmers to build on their knowledge honed over centuries through all kinds of climate change, they simply presented an unsustainable package deal with strings attached from the outside.
The lesson for the future of Yemen’s agriculture is obvious. Yemeni farmers have been successful in small-scale food production for centuries. While no one is proposing going back to reliance on simple scratch plows and animal labor as a permanent solution, the old systems can be built on and updated with appropriate changes. A major proponent of responsible change is the Yemeni NGO YASAD, the Yemeni Association for Sustainable Agricultural Development, the activities of which have been curtailed as the Yemen war wages on. Food aid must continue to avert famine, but aid to revitalize Yemeni farmers’ food production is just as urgent a need. Major donors like the World Bank, UNDP and FAO, USAID and all other interested agencies should find ways to help Yemeni farmers and local communities directly, not by imposing outside methods but allowing Yemenis to expand on their own successes.
Daniel Martin Varisco is an anthropologist and historian who conducted ethnographic research on highland springfed irrigation in Yemen in 1978-1979 and returned more than a dozen times as a development consultant and historian. He is currently translating the 13th century agricultural text of al-Malik al-Ashraf and other Rasulid documents on agriculture.
This post was republished on Informed Comment: https://www.juancole.com/2022/09/sovereignty-farming-suffers.html
This exquisite film was produced in 1973 and filmed in 1972, thus representing Yemen half a century ago. It is now available on Youtube. The filmmakers were Karen and Alain Saint Hilaire. The camera was a bolex ebm electric. It has filmed when Qadi al-Iryani was the head of government. There are scenes from the Tihama, Sanaa, Sa‘da, Ma’rib, etc, including many crafts, fishing, agriculture, a funeral, celebration of the end of the civil war and much more. It is well worth spending two hours to watch this archival film of a Yemen now largely past but not forgotten.
If you are bored with what you cook, give this rather ancient set of recipes a try. Read all about it on the MyMet website.
There is a fascinating Facebook site on old photographs of Jerusalem. Below is one of the images. Note the Victrola.
