The Moscow Times. The Geopolitics of sheep in an Armenian region

On the surface, it looks like a win-win. Iran faces a political population bomb: a young, growing, urbanized population that wants food — cheap and traditional. Iran's population has doubled in the last 40 years, hitting 75 million people today. Half of all Iranians are under 35 years of age, and 71 percent live in cities.

Immediately to the north lies help: the fallow grazing lands of Armenia. Fewer Armenian men want to make a living as shepherds, tending sheep on scenic but lonely mountain slopes. Armenia's agriculture ministry says that 70 percent of the nation's pastures are now without livestock — about 800,000 hectares.

Here's the deal: Iran's Ambassador to Armenia, Mohammad Reisi, offers to rent thousands of hectares of mountain pastures to provide grazing land for Iranian sheep. With the grazing leases, he has estimated that Armenia could increase its livestock fivefold. Within a decade, he says, Armenia could be exporting 2 to 3 million sheep a year to Iran.

On some stretches of territory, soldiers of Christian Armenia and Muslim Azerbaijan face each other across trenches, poised on hair-trigger alerts. About once a week, a military sniper on one side kills a soldier from the other side.

To the west, Armenia's land borders with Turkey are still closed, a legacy of bitter feelings over Ottoman Turkey's genocide campaign against ethnic Armenians in 1915.

At first glance, the Iranian offer sounds like a win-win for Armenia. Yet as environmentalist Hasmik Evoyan told me one morning in Yerevan, this is naive. She walked me through the geopolitics of sheep. She showed me why many Armenians saw putting lamb dishes on Iranian dinner tables as a lose-lose for Armenia.

The sheep would largely graze in Armenia's southernmost region, Syunik. Long and as narrow as 30 kilometers wide in some places, Syunik is Armenia's lifeline to Iran. But it is strategically vulnerable, sandwiched between two territories of Azerbaijan.

Although Syunik is Armenia's second-largest region, it is also one of its least populated. With 15 percent of Armenia's land area, Syunik has less than 5 percent of Armenia's people. The population dropped in the late 1980s after ethnic fighting forced an Azeri minority to flee to Azerbaijan and northern Iran.

On Feb. 14, four days before Armenia's highly contested presidential election, Evoyan and others protested the sheep deal in front of Armenia's National Assembly building in Yerevan. I arrived in Armenia's capital the next day. But Gohar Abrahamyan, a reporter for the Armenia Now news website, covered the protest. She got environmentalist Silva Adamyan to say out loud what many Armenians are thinking quietly.

"I remember how the Azerbaijanis were quietly taking control of Syunik during the Soviet years," Adamyan told Armenia Now. "We have liberated it. And now, we want to give it to them again? Can't we really understand that it is the same Azeris — citizens of Iran — who would be coming back to Syunik with their families, and so the blood we shed for those lands would turn out to be for nothing?"

In Armenia's presidential election, incumbent President Serzh Sargsyan was re-elected. But the opposition candidate, who performed strongly and claims the results were falsified, has been leading street protests. By all indications, the Iranian sheep project will die a bureaucratic death, buried in the Agriculture Ministry.