ArmInfo.Additional water intake from Lake Sevan will not be conducted until the permission of the National Assembly of Armenia is received, Minister of Agriculture of Armenia Artur Khachatryan told journalists on August 2. In the meantime, the State Committee on Water System of Armenia intends to make an additional water release from Lake Sevan amounting to 2 40 million cubic meters, while the environmentalists are against, noting the deplorable state of the main source of fresh water in the region and the possible water apocalypse in the republic.
According to the Minister of Agriculture, in this situation, it is more reasonable to use deep wells instead of additional water release from Sevan. Last year, more water was released from Sevan, the money received was transferred to the extra budgetary account, and if these funds are used to drill wells, Khachatryan believes that this will be more reasonable for both Sevan and Armenian agriculture.
For today, despite the Water Committee's proposal for additional water intake and the positive conclusion of the expert group on it, the government did not initiate the procedure and did not apply to the parliament.
"This means that not a single drop of water from Sevan will be released without the decision of the legislator," he said, stressing, however, that everything will depend on the weather conditions. In his opinion, the system needs radical reforms - the conclusion that 70% of water is lost, he as an organizer of agriculture, considers unacceptable. As the Minister emphasized, it is necessary to install water meters, and pay clearly for the water released, organize regular irrigation and make the process controllable.
To recall, on July 17, 2017 the National Assembly of Armenia approved the law on increasing the volume of water release from Lake Sevan from 170 million cubic meters to 270 million cubic meters. The reason for this decision was the fact that the water basins in the country were not full. According to environmentalists fish farms cause no less serious damage to the environment and water resources of the country. However, according to the environmentalist, specialist on water resources Qnarik Hovhannisyan, the Armenian government asks to increase the releases each year, justifing the request with deficit of irrigation water, but in fact only about 25% of the water from Sevan reaches the farmers, the remaining 70% is lost. Thus, despite the fact that the Ministry of Nature Protection of Armenia opposed the proposal to increase the water intake from Sevan, and independent experts unanimously reiterated that lowering the water level in Sevan would lead to irreversible consequences such as the intensification of the waterlogging process, the law was adopted, which, as expected, influenced the level of Lake Sevan. The authors of the law assured that additional releases of water per 100 million cubic meters, according to calculations, could lead to a decrease in the lake level by 8 cm, in case of which, even in comparison with the same day of the previous year, a high water level of Lake Sevan will be maintained at 10 cm (18-8). According to official data, in 2017 water intake totaled 266.757 million cubic meters of water, instead of the envisaged 270 million cubic meters.
As a result, already at the beginning of the current season of holidays, ecologists began to alarm about the problem of algae fouling Sevan, which, according to experts, is caused not only by high air temperature, scanty precipitation, the dumping of extremely polluted waters into the basins of the country and the lack of water treatment stations, but also last year's additional water release.