Armenian Farmers' Water Woes

“The earth has lost its strength,” Alvard Arakelyan said. “Whatever you plant, it won’t grow and there won’t be anything to take to market.”

Arakelyan moved to the Armenian capital Yerevan after the farmland around her home village Armavir region dried up.

“The land is turning to desert, yet the government doesn’t even consider addressing it. All they can do is chatter on television about how unused land should be tilled.”

Arakelyan blamed local fish farms for diverting irrigation water. The general problem she describes is much more widespread. All across Armenia, farmers are leaving their land because they cannot irrigate it, or because the water available is polluted.

Some, like Arakelyan, move to urban areas, while others head off abroad.

Simon Karapetyan, for example, plans to emigrate because the water reaching his village in the northern Lori region is so polluted by a metal mine in the area that it is no longer fit for irrigation.

“If they take away our water, then how can one talk about working the land?” he said.

Speaking to IWPR while waiting at Yerevan’s airport for a flight to Russia, Karapetyan, “I’m going, and if it works out, I’ll bring my family too.

Environmentalists warn that many others will follow in the next few years, particularly in the Syunik, Kotayk and Lori regions where mining operations are expanding.

Government officials say they are unaware of whether mining-related pollution is forcing people off the land.

Residents of Qajaran, a village in the southern Syunik region, have sent letters bearing more than 1,000 signatures to Armenia’s president, prime minister, and members of parliament, following a government decision in April to assign their area to the Zangezur Copper-Molybdenum Plant, which plans to begin mining there. So far, they have heard nothing back from the political leaders.

Village council leader Rafik Atayan said local people were given no advance warning, and the 131 families there were at a loss about what to do.

“Where are we to go? The graves of our parents and ancestors lie here. This is our land, our water, our home,” he said.

The Zangezur firm has already faced allegations relating to effluent discharges, following a leak from a waste dump containing mercury and cadmium into a tributary of the Voghji river in Syunik region.

Farmers in the area said they stopped watering their crops because of the risks.

“Eighty hectares of land were put out of action, and yields from the pasture fields were very low,” Samvel Sargsyan, an elder from the village of Syunik, said.

Levon Petrosyan, head of the inspectorate for nature protection at the regional governor’s office, told IWPR that the company had to pay a fine of 150,000 drams, around 410 US dollars, and 800,000 drams in compensation.

But as he pointed out, “All this money went into the government budget and didn’t help really help the villages.”

No one from the Zangezur company was available for comment.

Also in Syunik, residents of Lernadzor have voiced concerns about plans to prospect for uranium. They fear that exploratory drilling and any subsequent mining will contaminate ground water and pose a serious risk to human health. (IWPR reported on this issue last year; see Armenians Fight Uranium Mine Plans.)

Environmentalists are now concerned about a proposed iron ore mine in the Kotayk region of central Armenia.

Karine Danielyan, who heads the Association for Stable Human Development, said the mine would pollute the Hrazdan river, which flows into the Ararat valley, a major agricultural area, and also provides the capital with its water.

“When the Hrazdan seam is developed, Yerevan stands to lose more than 40 per cent of its drinking water, since the area where the Abovyan and Hrazdan deposits are located generate that percentage of the water that reaches the capital,” he said.

Ecology groups have also raised the alarm over reports that an ore-processing plant is to be built at Hrazdan as an adjunct of the mine.

Deputy environment minister Simon Papyan insisted this was not going to happen.

“We realise perfectly well that it wouldn’t be right to set up a factory in that area,” he said. “We understand the situation and the concerns that NGOs are raising.”

Official statistics indicate that two-fifths of the arable land in Armenia is lying unused. Some 530,000 people have left their home villages since the late 1980s, many of them as a result of a devastating earthquake in 1988.

Armenia also faces an alarming trend towards desertification of the land.

“Eighty per cent of Armenia’s territory is undergoing desertification, and 30 per cent is undergoing serious desertification,” Professor Ashot Khoyetsyan, a member of the International Academy of Ecology and Environmental Sciences, said. “This is largely a consequence of the unplanned use of pasture lands, and failure to use water resources rationally.”

In the last two years, the government has spent more than 700,000 dollars attempting to halt desertification.

“I can count about 20 programmes to combat desertification,” Ashot Vardevanyan, deputy head of bioresources management at the environment ministry, said. “At the moment, 80 per cent of rural land cannot be irrigated. Programmes must be implemented on a constant basis if we really want to see better results.”

Galust Nanyan is a freelance reporter in Armenia.