 |
Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 June 2000 Issue No. 484 
|
||
Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
|
Al-Ahram Weekly 1 - 7 June 2000 Issue No. 484
|
||
| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
| ||
Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Focus Features Heritage Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters Beyond plastic bags
By Roger Owen*
Visiting the fast-growing cities of the Lower Gulf again after a period of three years reveals just how quick they are changing even when oil prices are relatively low. The occasion was my second stint as a lecturer aboard a Harvard Alumni cruise which started in Dubai and worked its way round to Aqaba some 12 days later.
Dubai, as always, was in the midst of a huge construction boom with a brand new airport terminal, tall buildings stretching far down the Shaykh Zayed Road in the direction of Abu Dhabi and more and more tourist hotels along the coast. Meanwhile, its aim of establishing itself as the regional headquarters for all multinationals doing business in the Middle East is rapidly reaching its goal by attracting 13 of the 25 largest companies in the world. It is a success story which many of its less commercially-inclined Gulf Cooperation Council rulers must certainly envy.
What does not change, however, is the contrast between the Gulf states and their much poorer neighbour, Yemen. For the Americans on the cruise this is signalled not only by its centuries-old buildings but also by the ubiquitous presence of plastic bags and bottles so obviously absent in the well-swept streets of Qatar, Muscat, or Jidda. Like so many of the poorer countries of the world, the country has obviously been overwhelmed by a tide of modern rubbish which it has neither the money nor the physical resources to deal with.
What Yemen also illustrates is the dramatic nature of the shift from the old form of pre-plastic rubbish to the new. The local souqs still demonstrate some of the old methods by which food and liquids were contained, twists of paper, bags made out of banana-leaves, woven baskets and the customer's own earthenware pot or glass bottle.
Now with more and more shopkeepers using plastic bags and bottles the system is, temporarily at least, out of control. You could see the problem at first hand. In Sana'a, squads of men with brushes and small trucks were desperately trying to clean up the city in time for the arrival of the Arab heads of state invited to attend the 10th anniversary of Yemen's reunification on 22 May. Sadly, they were capable of making only tiny inroads into this huge problem.
To most Americans, and, indeed, most Westerners, the presence of so much plastic rubbish soon becomes the prime exemplar of Yemeni backwardness and lack of social development, something even more heinous than the very obvious chewing of lunch-time qat. "Why don't the people just get together and clean it up themselves?" I was frequently asked, as though this was common, everyday practice, in the poorer quarters of, say Los Angeles, Chicago or New York.
To begin with I would reply by pointing out that it wasn't the Yemenis who invented either plastic or the plastic bag and that it was up to those who had to find cheap ways of recycling it. Then, if I was feeling like being provocative I would ask whether the questioner would consider diverting some of the money they might be thinking of leaving to Harvard towards the purchase of a small municipal rubbish truck for Sana'a's narrow, crowded streets.
But I quickly realised that a better line to pursue as one of the cruise's two academic lecturers was to suggest that there was a strong link between rubbish and poverty. This at once led into a discussion of why the Yemenis were so relatively poor, a subject which rich people from rich countries often find particularly difficult to understand. It is something to do with the balance of people and resources, I would argue, referring back to the work of the early 19th century political economists like Ricardo and Malthus. And something to do with a local agriculture that has been undermined by cheap imported cereals from America and a rising level of rural wages as a result of labour migration to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.
Yemen is a beautiful country with its mountains, deserts, tall buildings and some of the oldest mosques in the Islamic world. It also contains a hard-working people who have struggled to maintain its terraced fields for centuries. Most foreigners who visit it for more than a few days are at once entranced. But it remains little known in America and Europe and its reputation depends far too much on shadowy memories of civil wars, its alleged support for Iraq during the Gulf War and now the new film "Rules of Engagement" which will establish it for many Western cinema goers as a hotbed of anti-Western fanaticism. Helping groups of tourists to see it in a more positive light is a worthwhile but often difficult goal.
* The writer is professor of history at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard.
