Hard times
In visits to five other villages around Armenia, an FAO photoreportage mission heard similar stories. Some villagers may be a bit better off, especially if they receive remittances from family members working in Russia, but most can't afford quality seed and were happy to receive it from FAO. Many survive on tiny state pensions or welfare payments and the little they can eke from their land.
In the southern village of Chiva, Ashot Manukyan says simply that the wheat seed he was given means "bread for a year".
"Every month I usually buy three sacks of flour and we bake our own bread," he says, explaining how his wife and six children get by. "But flour went from 7 000 dram a 50-kilo sack to 13 000 dram (US$23 to US$43). "I left my field fallow this year as I couldn't afford the inputs, but now I'll plant the field and we'll have our own wheat for bread," he says. He adds that the only income they have is 4 000 dram (US$13) a day earned by their 16-year-old son, who works as a herder.
The Manukyan family sleeps in a single-room house with concrete floors. A couple of rugs on the wall, a few beds, a small brazier on the floor and a refrigerator are the only furnishings. When winter temperatures dip to -20 C, they haul a wood-burning stove into the house, its chimney pushed through a round hole in the window.
The Manukyans received a small herd of sheep from a French NGO, they say, but were eventually forced to kill and eat the animals. The last of the meat is in the freezer.
When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 1990s and Armenia began the transition to a market economy, the newly independent country broke up the collective farms and distributed land in one or two hectare plots to the now-unemployed farm workers. There are 1.2 million such plots owned by people like Mr Manukyan who have little farming know-how.
"In Soviet times, I worked as a tractor driver and in livestock production on a collective farm. I only learned a little bit about wheat," Mr Manukyan explains.
FAO's seed project pays for basic agricultural training in the beneficiary villages, to be held during the quiet winter months, so that farmers like Mr Manukyan can get more out of their limited resources.
—December 2008
