Pashinyan Says Armenia Is Wasting Water as Farmland Sits Unused

Armenia is wasting large amounts of water through outdated irrigation systems while thousands of hectares of farmland remain unused because they cannot be reliably supplied, Prime Minister Nikol Pashinyan said Friday as his government laid out plans to overhaul the country’s water sector.

Speaking at a Sept. 4 workshop on water reforms for 2026-2031, Pashinyan said problems with drinking water, irrigation and wastewater treatment affect communities across Armenia.

He said most of the country’s arable land does not have access to irrigation. Even where water is available, inefficient methods mean far more is being used than necessary.

“Most of our arable land has no access to irrigation at all,” Pashinyan said. “If we look at this by 21st-century standards, the amount of water that should be sufficient to irrigate dozens of hectares of orchards is being used by us to irrigate just a few hectares.”

The lack of reliable irrigation has left thousands of hectares that could be used for agriculture sitting idle, he said.

Pashinyan also pointed to Armenia’s limited wastewater treatment capacity, saying treatment remains the exception rather than the norm. He warned that the situation carries environmental and public health consequences, some of which authorities have not been able to fully measure.

“It is clear that this kind of water use cannot be considered acceptable because it obviously has consequences,” he said. “We are not even able to trace and identify many of those consequences, but it is clear that we have this problem.”

Pashinyan said Armenia has enough water resources but lacks the infrastructure and management systems needed to capture, store and distribute them efficiently.

The government plans to draw up a roadmap for reform with input from state agencies, experts, businesses and local communities.

Changes are also expected in how water is priced. Pashinyan said current tariffs do not reflect the true cost of supplying water, while irrigation remains heavily subsidized by the state.

The government also wants to open more of the sector to private investment and introduce market-based mechanisms, a shift Pashinyan said is necessary to make the system financially sustainable.

The proposed reforms are expected to cover irrigation, drinking water supply, wastewater treatment, storage infrastructure and the broader management of Armenia’s water resources.

—

Support independent reporting from the region by subscribing to The Armenian Report. Our team is funded solely by readers like you.