"Ultimately, whether Yemen is able to achieve its goals for social and economic development, will, to a large extent, depend on its future population growth and size," said Gary Cook, senior health advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development, in his opening address at the Woodrow Wilson Center's all-day conference, "Yemen Behind the Headlines: Population, Health, Natural Resources, and Institutions."

Yemen's stalled economic development is particularly pronounced outside of urban areas, "where the resources are," said Daniel Egel, citing the country's failure to build modern transportation infrastructure and develop other economic activities besides farming. He called for the international development community to focus on creating jobs in rural areas, particularly by increasing the financing available for non-agricultural businesses and by improving secondary roads. In addition, he warned development actors to be aware of how gender inequality and local social structures, such as tribes, affect development efforts.

Given the country's dependence on agriculture, water scarcity poses a threat to Yemen's food security and its economic development. Three out of every four Yemeni villages depend on rainfall for irrigation, Egel said, making them highly vulnerable to unexpected climate change-induced shifts in precipitation patterns. Water scarcity also weakens the financial stability of Yemeni households, with the cost of water "accounting for about 10 percent of income during the dry season," he said.

Averting a "Domino Effect"

Al-Eryani asserted that water management policies will "have to be designed in piecemeal fashion," as no one single action will avert a catastrophe. He suggested a number of steps to alleviate the country's growing water crunch, including:

1) Focus on the rural population, which makes up 70 percent of the population, has the highest fertility rates, and are the most reliant on agriculture;

2) Move development efforts outside of Sanaa to other regions of the country;

3) Increase investment in desalination technology for coastal areas;

4) Increase water conservation in the agricultural sector; and,

5) Exploit fossil groundwater aquifers in Yemen's sparsely populated eastern reaches.

Unless such concrete steps are taken in the coming years, the outlook is grim. At current rates of usage, Al-Eryani predicted that the country's groundwater reserves could be almost entirely depleted by 2025. With up to 55 percent of the workforce engaged in agriculture, the water situation threatens to be a "domino effect of a crisis that invites many other consequences and ramifications that are really overwhelming," he said.

"The battle to strike a sustainable balance between population growth and sustainable water supplies was lost many years ago," Al-Eryani said. "But maybe we can still win the war if we can undertake some of these measures."

Yemen's protest movement is different than those of Egypt or Tunisia because neighboring countries, such as those in the Gulf Cooperation Council, are actively involved. "[They] don't have the luxury of saying this is a purely Yemeni affair," said Hull. "They have to identify where their national interests are and then they have to come up with a legitimate and effective way of protecting those interests." Included in those national interests is dealing with the presence of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

But, Hull said, "It would be a shame if, as part of this revolution, what was good in Yemen gets tossed out with what was bad." Among the institutions that should be protected are the Social Fund for Development, a government development initiative designed to reduce poverty, and the Central Security Forces, "still a very necessary institution and one that has to be protected if other challenges in Yemen are to be met," he said.

"It's a mistake to over-focus on the end of a regime. Yes, it's important to get a transfer of power, but I would argue [that it is] equally important to institutionalize the forces that have led to this, as a safeguard against the counter revolution and as an impetus to meeting those many, many political challenges that Yemen faces," said Hull.

Going forward, Hull said that elections will be key: Yemen had good electoral experiences in 2003 and 2006 but the system has since suffered some "backsliding." He also emphasized the importance of letting the youth participate, protecting social networking systems and NGOs, instituting legal requirements to promote transparency, and freeing up and protecting the media. "Unless you have a media spotlight, abuses are going to accumulate," he said.

"Yemen is not a basket case," said Charles Schmitz, an associate professor at Towson University, starting off the last panel. "There have been substantial achievements that I think we need to take into account." Among these achievements, he highlighted Yemen's growth in life expectancy, literacy rates, and gross domestic product. The country's population growth rate has also slowed over the past two decades, though its total fertility rate remains very high.

These gains were fuelled by two resource booms, Schmitz explained: mainly, remittances from the construction boom in the 1970s and oil production. However, oil production dropped off dramatically after peaking around 2001, and remittances have not been able to keep up with the growth of the economy.