Rivers dry, fields dusty, farmers turn to protest
VARZANEH, Iran — The small group of Iranian farmers gathered around their tractors — long idle, parked at the town entrance next to a canal that once irrigated their fields but has been dry for years — and they protested, pleading for help from the government.
“We are the people,” shouted Mostafa Benvidi. “Help the people. At night they go to bed hungry!” They held signs addressing officials they blame for their dried-up fields. “How long will you eat your bread made with our blood?” one sign read.
Every day, farmers hold their small protest outside Varzaneh. It’s a sign of the anger that has been growing over water shortages caused by a years-long drought but worsened, experts say, by government mismanagement.
Protests have gotten larger, with bursts of violence, at a time when economic woes in the country from inflation to unemployment have fueled unrest repeatedly over the past year.
In March, Benvidi, 30, lost sight in his left eye and has more than 100 pellet shots in his body, suffered during clashes between police and farmers who held a sit-in strike in Varzaneh. Earlier this month, in another part of southern Iran, 11 people were wounded when police broke up a protest in Khorramshahr, where residents complain of brown water coming from their taps.
“Officials just come and promise to deal with the crisis and then just leave,” Benvidi said.
He and his family of six siblings and their father used to rely on their 7-acre farm, planting barley, wheat, corn and cotton. But they haven’t been able to farm for years because of lack of water. Now Benvidi is unemployed, and his family lives off the seasonal construction work his brothers get in nearby towns and his sister’s carpet weaving.
Over the past decade, Iran has seen the most prolonged and severe drought in more than 30 years, according to the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization. An estimated 97 percent of the country has faced some level of drought, Iran’s Meteorological Organization says.
Isfahan province, where Varzaneh is located, and neighboring provinces in central Iran have been hit particularly hard.
The fields around Varzaneh are now stretches of desiccated, salt-laced dirt. The cattle are gone. Around 90 percent of the farming activities in the district have faded away, said Reza Khalili, an environmental activist in Varzaneh.
Unless policies change, “we are heading from a water crisis to a disaster,” said Hamid Safavi, a professor of water resources management and environmental engineering at the Isfahan University of Technology. “This is not conjecture. It is a certainty.”