Where are Armenias poor people?
Poverty is almost evenly distributed between urban and rural areas in Armenia. The country’s poorest people are concentrated along the nation’s borders, in mountain areas and in earthquake zones. Shirak in north-eastern Armenia and Lori and Kotayk in the central part of the country are among the poorest provinces. Why are rural people poor? Armenia was the first former Soviet Union country to dismantle its 600 huge collective farms and distribute agricultural land to individual households. More than 330,000 small-scale farms were created overnight to ensure a minimum, basic food supply and to absorb workers from now-extinct industries. Many new farmers were allotted land in mountain areas where harsh natural conditions severely restrict productivity. And many of them did not have the technical knowledge and skills they needed to cultivate the land efficiently. Technology and infrastructure such as farm machinery and irrigation inherited from the pre-transition period was useless to sma
