“I have sown several hectares of barley this year, but not half of what I sowed grew,” one of the villagers complained to me the other day. He said that he had applied to the Ministry of Economy (the Ministry of Agriculture, as it is known, does not exist in Armenia), and they “gave him hope” that they were PREPARING to start drip irrigation next year. This is a very typical practice for the current government. Instead of strengthening the dilapidated pillar, they say that in the future, they may “renovate” it. In fact, the water resources in Armenia are sufficient, but the irrigation network is mainly over 40 years old, and the management of that sphere is just as “old.” Upgrading these two is more urgent than switching to drip irrigation, which is a necessity, of course, but it should be the result of several years of planned work.
Problems in Armenia are solved on “a linguistic level.” The government sees its problem not in, say, ensuring the security of our borders, but in finding words that justify why that security is not ensured. Suppose those words are convincing to the majority of our population, but does it solve those problems within the conditions of a collapsing state?
During the session of the government on March 18th, Prime Minister Pashinyan asked about the level of water resources and reservoirs. The Minister of Territorial Administration and Infrastructure, Suren Papikyan, said that at this stage, the level of reservoirs is at least sufficiently assessed.
“In fact, the predictions are that we will have fewer water problems this year,” the minister said. The Prime Minister concluded from that report that villagers will not have water problems this year. He probably thought that the monsoon season would start in Armenia in the summer. But that did not happen. Of course, for any failure, even a national tragedy, our government finds some “tricks” to justify itself. The pain is that barley does not grow from “tricks.”
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… In this case, the drought is to blame. During another Greek invasion in 480 BC, King Xerxes’ fleet lost about 600 ships in a storm, and the king ordered the sea to be punished and flogged. Maybe we should punish the drought now?
Aram Abrahamyan
