ThevillageofAygehovitin Tavush, which has a twelve-kilometer border withAzerbaijan, seems like an impressive and rich area at first glance.  The community has 922 hectares of arable land and 103 hectares of vineyards.  But only ten percent of the arable land and only half of the vineyards are irrigated.  Around one-third of the total land is right next to the border; it has been mined and is therefore unusable.

There are 3,570 people registered in Aygehovit, and 3,390 are permanent residents.  Around 200 people are abroad, some with families, the others having left to seek work.  They work for five or six months and return home in the fall.

“The most important thing is that none of the houses in the village is for sale.  They may have left, but they’re keeping their houses,” said village head Levon Grigoryan and added, “There is emigration, but there is also an opposite trend.  People want to return.  Two families have already come back.”

The reason people leave can be explained by the socio-economic conditions in the village.  But those who return do not do so because those conditions have improved.  “I don’t know why they want to return,” said the village head, “But the fact remains that some people want to come back.”

In contrast to other village heads, Levon Grigoryan did not consider the wave of emigration a catastrophe.  “They have always gone and come back.  Many left in the 1950s; after they constructed the Bentonit factory and Azatamut city in 1977, once again many people left the village.”  What he did consider catastrophic was the issue of the labor force.  “The number of people working in agriculture is declining, because it is mainly the elderly - young people are not interested in that work.”

Some of the youth are students, while others leave for Russia after their military service, trying to find short-term work.  “Those that remain don’t want to cultivate land or raise animals,” said Grigoryan.

There are many reasons why, each equally important, and all interconnected.  “We have a good stretch of hill where we can develop animal husbandry,” said the community head, but then immediately added that the road needed to be repaired for the hill - located around 70 km away - to be accessible.

“Why don’t the villagers sow grain?” asked Aslibek Aharonyan, land organizer at the village head’s office, and without waiting for a reply, noted that the village did not have a combine. “Grain is not like apples, so that you can gather it in ten days.  If you don’t harvest it in time, it spoils.”  And it happens that they pay for fuel and for sowing as well as for the seeds, but because they cannot find a combine they lose not only any potential profit, but all their investments as well.  “That’s why there are people who don’t sow anything, people who plant corn haphazardly as well as many who just plant grass to feed their animals,” said land organizer Aharonyan.

The residents of Aygehovit raise animals only to fulfill their family’s needs.  “They keep only enough animals to maintain the milk, curds and cheese for their homes.  They take them to the market in Ijevan only very rarely,” said the village head.

The closed border with the neighboring country has deprived the villagers of an accessible market.  They both recalled how, when the border was open, the animals would not even be brought home from the hills, but rather taken straight to the market in Ghazakh and sold.

The distance from any accessible markets and lack of trade relations has made Aygehovit a closed economy.  Aslibek Aharonyan said that the forests of their village yielded around 70-80 tons of blackberries a year.  “I’m not even going to go into the other fruits - cornels, walnuts - of which we have a lot too.  All right, there are no markets nearby.  But if we had a processing unit here then people could gather the fruit and there would at least be a few jobs as well,” he said.

The residents of Aygehovit used to mostly grow grapes and tobacco during the Soviet years.  Now many are returning to the vineyards, but they have not been able to reestablish tobacco cultivation.  Tobacco requires a lot of water, of which there is none here.  “The pump is broken and the internal irrigation system is out of order, leaving our villagers at the mercy of the rain and the sun,” said the village head and assured us that renovating the irrigation system could have a massive effect.  “I don’t think it will affect tobacco cultivation, because that is not very lucrative.  But everyone will start growing grapes.”

Grapes are the only agricultural product which have a market.  The Yerevan Brandy Factory has a post in Berd, a city 50 kilometers from Aygehovit, where they buy grapes.  The Ijevan Wine Factory is 14-15 kilometers away.  Both are potential buyers of grapes from the villagers and the roads leading to them are in good condition.

Seeing these possibilities, the people want to establish vineyards.  According to the village head, to set up a vineyard over one hectare of land, one needs to make an investment of 7,000-8,000 dollars.  That leads to the problem of long-term loans.  The villagers do not have the means to secure such loans.  “Nobody would give the villagers a 6-7 year loan with low interest, so that he can set himself up.  A vineyard would be a good set up, wouldn’t it?” said the land organizer, who thought that a vineyard would not be enough to solve all the problems that the villagers faced, but would help make things easier on them.

The establishment and renovation of infrastructure is vital, but the issues of creating markets and making investments are no less important.  However, village head Levon Grigoryan felt that the most important need was to change the mindset of the villagers.  “Some people have land, but don’t want to work.  Give him water, equipment, a loan - he still won’t cultivate it.”

Fifteen years have passed since private ownership of land was granted.  The villagers have tried many different things and learned a lot.  The land-villager-government relationship needs a lot of improvement.  That has to be done simultaneously with the development of social and economic infrastructure.  “First, those that don’t work must see that those who do work are better off; the rest will fall into place by itself,” said the Aygehovit community head and gave hope that many in the village had already understood that much.