Armenia's Yezidi Farmers Face Ruin

Yezidi sheep farmers say they face ruin after a sudden surge in demand from Iran, which saw a third of the country’s flock exported last year.

The Yezidis, a minority who speak a language similar to Kurdish, traditionally dominate the lamb and mutton trade in Armenia but say the resulting sheep shortage is forcing them out of business.

Qamil Shadoyan lives near Yerevan and, until last year, had 50 sheep. His sons looked after his flock, while he sold the meat to picnickers or pilgrims on the Yerevan-Garni-Geghard highway. In a normal week, he slaughtered seven or eight sheep, and even visited distant villages to buy lambs.

But in August last year, it all changed. An Iranian trader offered to buy his whole flock, offering 25,000 drams (70 US dollars) for each sheep. This seemed like a dream come true, until he tried to replace his animals in nearby villages and realised their livestock had been bought as well.

“The prices for sheep were rising from one day to the next. We thought at the beginning that the situation would stabilise, but it became worse and worse,” he said.

According to official figures, in the final three months of last year, Armenia exported 140,000 sheep, compared to a total of 13,000 exported in the previous five years put together.

Gevorg Sahakyan, an expert in regional trade, said the boom appeared to be a side-effect of a sudden sharp collapse in exports from Syria, which had hit Saudi Arabia – a major sheep importer.

He assumes, therefore, that the sheep exported to Iran were actually intended for re-export to Saudi Arabia since Iran is already a major exporter and was unlikely to need them for its internal market.

“Essentially, with the help of the sheep imported from Armenia, Iran is trying to restore the disrupted balance in the regional sheep market,” he said.

The sharp increase in exports shocked Armenia’s Yezidi community, especially those whose sheep were among the 32,500 exported in September, at the start of the boom. They are furious and feel they lost out on the higher prices later in the year. After November, the average sheep cost 70-80,000 drams (220-240 dollars).

By the end of the year, Armenia was suffering from a dearth of sheep and was forced to import them from Georgia.

Omar Mamoyan, a member of the National Council of the Union of Yezidis, and a consultant for minority issues in the Agrarian-Farmer Union of Armenia, said that half of the ewes in Armenia had been exported, so there would be a very low amount of lambs born for the next few years.

“We oppose the fact that they removed our sheep, and that the prices rose. Maybe this benefited ten Yezidis, but for the whole nation – for Armenians, as well as Yezidis - it was bad,” he said.

Aziz Tamoyan, the official leader of the world’s Yezidis, was also concerned by the export surge.

“We will need ten years to restore the previous size of the flock. Armenia’s sheep-rearing has had a crisis, and most sheep belong to the Yezidis. There are Yezidi villages, when the number of sheep has reduced tenfold,” he said.

He said that the Yezidis who lost out in their deals have been forced to leave the country, and Shadoyan was considering such a step himself, now he has lost his livelihood.

“Armenians do not want to buy mutton now, because it is twice as expensive as beef,” he said.

He and many of his fellow Yezidi sheep-dealers blame the government for failing to regulate the market. They say they would not have sold their breeding-age ewes had they known the surge of demand would continue – a position also held by Tamoyan.

“The agriculture minister promised me that only rams would be exported, but this did not happen. What the minister said does not correspond with reality,” he said.

The agriculture ministry is considerably more relaxed about the issue, however, saying that the Yezidis are overstating the significance of what happened for commercial reasons. Ashot Hovhannisyan, head of the ministry’s livestock department, said mostly ewes too old to breed had been exported.

“When the sheep began to be exported, the Iranians began to deal, not with Yezidi middlemen, but directly with farmers. They found Armenian peasants and told them they would buy at once 40 of their 100 sheep. Our Yezidi colleagues were removed from the process. This is the whole reason for their dissatisfaction,” he said.

All the same, the Yezidis are not happy. They fear that, when the lambing season finishes at the end of May, Iranian traders will once more start buying up the lambs, leaving them squeezed out of the market.

The agriculture ministry has planned to develop sheep farming by increasing the size of the national flock to 1.5 million from a million, and by importing new breeds from the North Caucasus, from Austria and from Germany.

But this is not enough for many Yezidis, who demand that all exports should be banned for at least two years to allow numbers to recover.

Samvel Avagyan is a correspondent from the Capital newspaper.