DISGRUNTLED FARMERS CYNICAL ABOUT PROMISED U.S. AID
By Ruzanna Stepanian

Radio Liberty, Czech Rep.
April 13 2006

By all accounts, Hrant Sargsian is one of hundreds of thousands
of people who are supposed to be the main beneficiaries of $235.65
million in additional economic assistance to Armenia approved by the
United States. He is poor, lives in a rural area, and has trouble
irrigating crops grown on his modest plot of land.

But just like many other residents of Marmarashen, a village in the
southern Ararat region, the 68-year-old subsistence farmer does not
think that his plight will improve as a result of rural infrastructure
projects to be implemented under the U.S. Millennium Challenge Account
(MCA) program. “Charles Aznavour,” explains Sargsian, “too raised
money for Armenia but we didn’t get a single penny.”

“Now they say they want to sort out our drinking water and irrigation,”
he says. “But they won’t. The sum may reach Armenia, but we won’t see
[any benefit of] it.”

The cynicism is echoed by farmers throughout the fruit-growing Ararat
Valley, Armenia’s most developed agricultural region stretching along
its border with Turkey. Long neglected by the regional and central
governments, they have been left alone in coping with enormous problems
that plagued Armenian agriculture following the Soviet collapse.

There is a widely held belief among local residents that much of
external aid to Armenia has been embezzled by corrupt government
officials and that the U.S. aid will not be an exception. The popular
mood in other regions of the country, where farming conditions are
more difficult, is hardly more positive.

“If the entire sum reaches its destination that will be good, but
I am skeptical,” said a farmer in Mkhchian, another Ararat Valley
village. “Only 10 percent of the aid will serve its purpose.”

“How many ministers do we have? They will distribute that money among
themselves,” claimed another local resident.

Armenian and U.S. officials insist that as much as 75 percent of
approximately one million Armenians dependent on farming will directly
benefit from the five-year program. They say Armenia’s widespread
rural poverty will fall by 6 percent as a result. In addition,
the U.S. Millennium Challenge Corporation, which runs the scheme,
has pledged to closely oversee the use of the MCA funds to rule out
their possible misappropriation and other corrupt practices.

Most of the sum, $146 million, will be spent on refurbishing Armenia’s
Soviet-era irrigation networks. Another $67 million would go to
pay for capital repairs of about 1,000 kilometers of rural roads
that have fallen into disrepair over the past decade. A Millennium
Challenge Corporation statement last said that these two projects will
“significantly increase the annual incomes of rural poor.”

But local farmers say better roads and irrigation alone are not a
fundamental solution to their woes. They say they will still lack
access to cheap credit and fertilizers and struggle to pay for
water and the basic utilities. Nor will be they be compensated by
the state anytime soon for hail or cold snaps that regularly destroy
their crops. Agriculture insurance remains practically non-existent
in Armenia.

“As soon as farmers are able to get long-term loans from banks
without any bureaucratic hurdles, they will get on their feet,”
said a Mkhchian farmer. “That would be real poverty reduction.”

For farmers in the village of Masis, a key problem is not so much a
lack of irrigation water as its prohibitive cost. “Water is available
here,” said one of them, Ashot Ghazarian. “But it is so expensive that
villagers can not afford it with proceeds from sales of their produce.”

Ghazarian says this is what prompted him and many other locals to
sell their land and become agricultural laborers. Its main buyer,
commercial farmer Zhora Galstian, already owns more than 100 hectares
(250 acres) of the Masis land, a very big plot by Ararat Valley
standards. But even he is unhappy.

“More villagers come and ask me to buy their land but I don’t want
to,” explains Galstian. “What would I do with it? I already earn few
revenues despite working much harder than any city businessman.”