“The coalition was and is targeting intentionally food production, not simply agriculture in the fields,” Martha Mundy, a professor emeritus at the London School of Economics, told Salon.

Since March 2015, a coalition of Middle Eastern countries led by Saudi Arabia and armed and supported by the U.S. and Britain has bombed Yemen, creating what the United Nations has characterized as one of the worst humanitarian catastrophes in the world.

A blockade imposed by Saudi Arabia has further exacerbated this crisis, pushing hunger-stricken Yemen to the brink of famine. “An entire generation could be crippled by hunger,” a World Food Program official warned this week. At least 14 million Yemenis, more than half of the country’s population, are going hungry.

Meanwhile, the Western-backed coalition is going out of its way to target food sources in the desperate country, according to Mundy, who in recent years has published scholarly articles in English and Arabic on the political economy of food and agricultural policy in Yemen.

Saudi-led forces have for 19 months have tried to topple Yemen’s Houthi movement, which seized power in late 2014, in order to restore to power the former pro-Saudi leader Abd-Rabbu Mansour Hadi, who had been appointed president in 2012 after an ostensible election with no opposition candidates.

“In the first three months of the war the targets were largely military, but when surrender did not result, the pattern of targeting changed,” Mundy told Salon via email.

In a recent The Independent article, Mundy said the Saudi coalition is “deliberately targeting Yemen’s tiny agricultural sector in a campaign which, if successful, would lead a post-war Yemeni nation not just into starvation but total reliance on food imports for survival.”

Yemeni government statistics and the Yemen Data Project lists “make very clear that roads and trucks carrying food were repeatedly targeted” by the coalition, Mundy told Salon.

“A degree of targeting that can’t be accidental comes through both the data sets on targets of coalition bombing,” Mundy added, noting that she is still conducting a more thorough analysis of the time of the attacks.

On Aug. 12, the coalition bombed and destroyed the main bridge to Sanaa, the Yemeni capital, on a road where roughly 90 percent of U.N. food and other aid is transported from the port city Hodeidah. After the attack, Oxfam issued a statement warning that the bridge’s destruction “threatens to leave many more people unable to feed themselves, worsening an already catastrophic situation in the country.”

Mundy said that the main road between Sanaa and Hodeidah has been repeatedly hit as part of a larger intentional strategy.

The U.N. and various human rights organizations have accused Saudi-led forces of numerous war crimes, documenting scores of coalition attacks on a wide array of civilian areas, including hospitals, schools, homes and refugee camps.

Agricultural infrastructure has been targeted in particular. Given that Yemen is still a largely agricultural nation, with more than half the population reliant on farming in some way, the bombing has had a horrific impact.

At least 357 agricultural targets have been bombed in Yemen’s 20 provinces — a conservative estimate in a report by Yemen’s ministry of agriculture and irrigation that was obtained by Mundy. In addition to markets, stores, factories and food trucks, the Western-backed coalition has bombed farms, animals, water infrastructure and agricultural banks.

Just 2.8 percent of Yemen’s land is cultivated, Mundy told The Independent’s Robert Fisk, citing a figure from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N. “To hit that small amount of agricultural land, you have to target it,” she said. The Independent article pointed out that the intentional destruction of civilian food supplies violates the Geneva Conventions, a major basis for international law.

At least 10,000 Yemenis have been killed in the ongoing, 19-month war, including more than 4,100 civilians, according to the U.N. The United Nations has also repeatedly reported that the U.S.-backed, Saudi-led coalition is responsible for nearly two-thirds of civilian deaths, whereas Houthi rebels and allied militias loyal to former Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh have been responsible for less than one-fourth of civilian deaths. Extremist groups like al-Qaida and ISIS, which have been strengthened by the war, were responsible for the rest.

Yet these are tallies of deaths caused by warring parties; they could pale in comparison to the possibly enormous number of Yemenis who might die from starvation and malnutrition.

Since June 2015 nongovernmental organizations have warned that more than 80 percent of Yemen’s population (at least 21 million people) is in desperate need of humanitarian aid, including food, water and medicine. The Saudi blockade has made the already disastrous effects of the bombing even worse.

“The blockade of ports by the coalition also greatly affected inputs for agriculture and food imports,” Mundy told Salon. “The bombing and the blockade had conjoined effects.”