Nothing idyllic

IN A village orchard on the fringe of the Lut desert in south-eastern Iran, Shah Banu Esma Ilani (literally, the Queen of Esma Ilan) plucks pistachios from a huge tree and puts them in a pouch in her tunic. A qanat, a trench that occasionally brings water from aquifers beneath mountains hundreds of miles away, cuts across her land but is bone-dry. Her little village is nearly empty of people. In the past two decades, three-quarters of them have left for work hundreds of kilometres away in Tehran, the capital, or Isfahan, a bit closer. “These are heart-wrenching times,” says Shah Banu. “We don’t have enough water for our people to stay here. They leave because the government has forgotten about us. The more people leave, the more the government forgets about us.”

It is a tale that can be told in many villages in Iran’s vast semi-arid swathes. Poor administration and global warming have imperilled many of them. The qanat network, created three millennia ago to irrigate ancient Persia, has long been neglected. Ground and river water is often diverted to industrial farms from the qanats, which local government have less incentive to maintain as urbanisation spreads apace. Shah Banu says that broken qanats have cut her harvest by 70% in 20 years. President Hassan Rohani has submitted a draft austerity budget that aims to lop a third off infrastructure spending and to squeeze inflation, now running at 36% a year by an official count. Some MPs in rural constituencies have resigned in protest. But they have been denounced in the hardline bits of the press for inciting “mob democracy to please the enemies of the revolution.” The new government has appealed to them to return to parliament to hammer out a final budget.