Yemen: Claiming the futurePart VI in a series [Archives:2004/755/Culture]
July 15 2004
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For the Yemen Times
In the final part of her essay 'Yemen: Claiming the Future', serialized in Yemen Times, Irena Knehtl concludes her historical discussion of the economy of Yemen with a vision for its future development.
Open Skies
” the strength of a country is no longer measured by its military might, size of population, geographical situation of material resources. The strength of a country is measured by the wealth of its scholars, and its scientists, by its innovative capabilities, and ability to discover, achieve and apply
Nagib Mahfouz. Egyptian Nobel Price winning novelist
End of Geography- Specialize and Globalize
think of us such thoughts
bridge distance
Driven by a vision and committed to the challenge of tomorrow, the world today is going through an information revolution and we know that man is distinguished from other creatures by the brain which is the secret of the Creator, where the science and information are stored, the place where distinction, superiority, vision, and foresight lie, and the laboratory of experience and conceptualization. Correct information stored in the mind will give rise to wonder and admiration.
Sweeping changes in technology continue to transform our lives. The “known” is being replaced by the “new”. No doubt the real wealth of any nation is made up of human resources. They are the power that achieves development in all walks of life. They are the power behind ever-changing ambitions. This is the way towards glory, dignity and success.
Quality, for example is manifested in myriad forms, in products, services and most vital of all, the people, each striving tirelessly to achieve only the very best and nothing else, every time, all the time. Setting quality standards all the way and achieving them time after time.
Industry that creates culture when limits become opportunities
In the highly industrialized countries the explosion of civilization into a myriad of micro-cultures and social fragmentation have made markets less and less transparent, creating new problems for industry accustomed for over a century to impose its products on the market and now obliged to completely reverse its viewpoint. As a result of reflection on these matters, traditional methods of interpreting the market of product planning and of projecting its own image are no longer suitable. It is useless to try to understand a market that is evolving constantly.
This means constantly trying to catch up.
In the recent years the custom of entrusting total responsibility for creativity to internal structures has changed – a new trend is emerging, extending this responsibility to a more complex system of interrelationships between project, industry, environment and the market place. In a market that is losing its transparency and becoming opaque it is understood that instead of selecting its markets, it had to transform itself, becoming a transparent structure that the markets could turn to as representative of tastes and trends and with which they could identify. In a society in which the exchange of information and knowledge grows daily, the emerging image of a company is increasingly represented by its cultural reality and the consistency of behavior. What a company does becomes much more important than what it says. The culture of our time is also an expression of both, a company's professionalism and its ability to absorb external professional knowledge that moves at different levels and evolves faster and faster.
The result is this awareness that industry does not only create culture by earmarking resources for sponsorship programs but by taking full responsibility for its own role, which is to play its part in the complex, multifaceted game of contemporary society.
The late eighties and early nineties showed that a limit did in fact exist. In other words, we realized that the environment and its protection had to put constraints on production methods and on consumer habits. We became aware that we had to bring environmental awareness to new technologies, and that these would have to find development solutions that were compatible with the environment. This is the huge cultural challenge that marked the nineties. And one of its basic tenets will certainly be the passage from the culture of production to that of regeneration.
In other words we can no longer afford eternal products and the process leading to the first of a product will also have to plan the details of its demise. There is a trend towards a sort of cyclic nature in the research/production/consumer system. It is a new idea, but it is century old if we consider its affinity with traditional agriculture, which never knew the existence of waste because everything was recycled in a cyclical system. The idea will be a winner, if attitudes are changed: – designers by creating products that are more easily and more economically recyclable, institutions by creating mechanisms that reward and encourage recycling, consumer by helping the whole complex system to function by their behavior.
In order to do things differently one should know how to go against the tide, knowing how to run the risk of mistakes on its own rather than relying on just experience, connecting local needs with global resources, and taking every opportunity to grow and expand.
Knowledge Society:
Natural resources and human resources are our core competencies. Particularly, rich bio-diversity is our wealth. During the last century, the world underwent a change from an agriculture society where manual labor was the critical factor to industrial society where the management of technology, capital and labor provided the competitive advantage. Thus the information era was born, where connectivity and software products drove the economy of a few nations.
In the 21st century a new society is emerging where knowledge is the primary production resource instead of capital and labor. Efficient utilization of this existing knowledge can create comprehensive wealth and also improve the quality of life in the form of better health, education, infrastructure and other social indicators. The ability to create and maintain the knowledge infrastructure and develop knowledge enhanced their productivity through the creation of the prosperity of this knowledge society. Whether a nation has arrived at the state of a knowledge society is judged by the way the country effectively deals with knowledge creation and knowledge development in sectors such as IT, industry, agriculture and healthcare.
Green Revolution:
Land is Life, Land is Democracy
That is belonged to us
That we belonged to it
The seas wild as silk
The spring rains,
The apricot trees,
Grapes, mangoes, melons and coffee
The dusty mountains
Green geometric terraces
The golden brown desert
The stars …
It is the right time for Yemen to embark upon a green revolution,
which will enable an increase in productivity of cereals. The challenge is to double productivity with lesser areas being available for cultivation. We must further the type of technologies needed, proper training to the farmers, and provide additional modern equipment for crop preservation and storage.
This second revolution would mean graduating from grain production to food processing and marketing. The utmost care should be taken of the environment and the people, leading to sustainable development and empowering the rural people. An integrated connectivity approach such physical connectivity by providing roads in rural areas, electronic connectivity by providing a reliable communication network and knowledge connectivity are all prerequisites for economic connectivity.
Good teaching and interactive teaching are possible through tele-education and inspired teachers. Healthcare facilities for rural and remote village can be provided by mobile clinics. The farming community with advanced water conservation and management methods can increase productivity.
Energy for Technology
or the earth is too wide
for a free man to put up with
humiliation or hatred!
It is unlikely that the unseen river that flows below the garden referred to by the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) could have been oil. The unseen river flows from springs of creativity that have remained alive through all Arab glories and Arab frustrations.
Energy pervades every aspect of human life. It is an important motor of economic growth, whilst in the environmental dimension, energy extraction, conversion and use cause environmental stress at the global and local levels. In the social dimension, energy is a prerequisite for the fulfillment of many basic human needs and services, and inequities in energy provision and quality often manifest themselves as issues of social justice.
Energy has a variety of forms – chemical, electrical, mechanical, nuclear or thermal. Energy from thermal sources such as the combustion of fossil fuels (coal, oil, or natural gas) and biomass (such as wood) and from nuclear fission (of uranium) is called primary energy.
Historically, global energy consumption has considerably outstripped global population growth. In the past forty years alone energy consumption has trebled. About half the world's population depend for energy on biomass fuels – charcoal, dung, straw or wood and human and animal muscle power.
For the rest of the world's people oil is the main source of energy accounting for about 40 per cent of their energy consumption. Coal accounts for about 30 percent, natural gas accounts for about 20 percent, hydroelectric power for about 6 percent and nuclear power for about 4 per cent. Uranium is a non-renewable source of energy, like coal, natural gas, oil and peat. About one third of the energy in use today is in the form of electricity.
Renewable energy resources have great advantages, but they also have some disadvantage. The sun, ocean, wind and rivers can, of course, never be depleted. Renewable sources are very much less damaging to the environment and produce less waste than burning fossil fuels or using nuclear power. Wind power is effective in uplands and coastal areas. Tidal power is also potentially a useful source of energy. Solar power using the sun's rays to provide heat directly or to generate electricity has obvious applications in countries where the sun shines at times at which power is required. In these countries it is ideal for small scale use, such as driving pumps for irrigation or for cooking.
Energy for Technology aims at changing the political culture that has prevailed during the last century and working our economies for economic relations between energy producing Arab countries and industrial countries to be established on the basis of serving the interests of all and benefiting all participants.
The purpose would be to identify the imbalances between cost of energy and cost of technology. At the heart of such undertaking is the ethical principle of cooperation, and to achieve safety, security and prosperity for the benefit of all concerned based on commercial exchange of energy for technology. The ultimate goal is to achieve economic prosperity for the Arab nation, which in turn will ensure the process of further democratization and openness in the region, and as such will ensure political and economic stability and security in the region.
The ultimate goal is also to reach a united Arab market, (Arab Economic Union) which will attract predominantly European/international investments to the United Arab Market, and further develop an equal partnership with the EU.
The Wealth of Diversity
The modern world proud of its achievements, preoccupied with its anxieties, is prone to be concerned only with the present. The fact is that to understand the present we must understand the past – and that implies acceptance of the past on its own terms, and a leap of imagination is require to recapture it. That does not come naturally to the current generation. Memories grow shorter and expectations longer than their fathers.
In the concert of the world, the orchestra is made up of all the centuries past and present, and they all play at the same time, but each has his eyes fixed upon his own stand and on the conductor's baton. He hears nothing but his own instrument. As we are both a part of the orchestra as well as a part of the audience we must offer a synoptic, symphonic response.
Whilst the history of Asia is largely the story of the many countries of the continent, there are magical inter-relationships, which are not always easy to define.
A poet once remarked, we must no longer be satisfied with isolated lamps, we should have a festival of lights.
The Arab Peninsula once again stands at the cross-road of continents, influencing events in Asia, Africa, and Europe. Unlike other peoples in Asia, the Arabs remain trans-continental in their outlook and involvement. The Arabs view themselves as bridge between the continents, belonging to each of them but not circumscribed any single one. The economic ties of the Arab counties may get stronger with Europe once progress is achieved in Palestine and Iraq, partly because of investment needs and partly through the externalization of some production facilities from the highly industrialized European heartland.
Yemenis, for example, were great traders, scholars, astronomers and sea-faring people. Once upon the time, some two thousand year ago, Yemeni caravans transported to the shores of Mediterranean incense that grew in their mountain regions and the spices of the East. They did this without revealing the Chinese origin of silk. Hence the expression “Arabia Felix”, “Happy Arabia”, given by the Roman geographers to designate this fabled land – Yemen
References:
Yemen Central Bank Reports, World Bank reports, UNDP reports, my unpublished notes, all verses are from Lyrics from Arabia, photo credit Irena Knehtl.
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[archive-e:755-v:13-y:2004-d:2004-07-15-p:culture]
