Tajikistan is a Farsi-speaking, mountainous state with few people but lots of snowmelt that fills its rivers with unused water. Iran often suffers droughts, which are becoming more troublesome as the country’s population surges. The population of Iran has more than doubled since the revolution from 34 million to 75 million.
The Islamic Republic News Agency quoted Larijani as telling Tajikistan President Emomali Rahmon that the Majlis will support a proposal to send Iranian gas to Tajikistan on a barter basis for Tajiki water in return.
That would make the exchange convenient as neither country would need funds.
However, Larijani said nothing about the cost of the project, which would require two pipelines, nor did he say who would pay for it. Nor did he address an even touchier—how many cubic meters of water Iran would expect for every cubic meter of gas.
At their closest approach, Iran and Tajikistan are 600 miles apart, so any such pipeline project would require the assent of the countries in between. Water carried over such distance would not likely to be cheap. Furthermore, a 600-mile pipeline only gets the water from the Tajik border to the Iranian border near Mashhad. Long and costly pipes would be needed to distribute the water to population centers and agricultural regions within Iran.
Tajikistan is very mountainous and it is not clear how costly it would be to collect water and pipe it the border. However, once it reaches the border, there is a relatively flat route across northern Afghanistan and then into Uzbekistan and looping north, then west and south to the Iranian border with little need for expensive pumping stations to get water over high ground.
Iranian relations with Tajikistan have been quite close ever since Tajikistan became independent in 1991. The Tajik language is a part of the Persian linguistic family, along with Dari, which is spoken in much of Afghanistan.