I'm working on a documentary about the water crisis in Iran, but I travelled to Israel last month to study their achievements and experience. If you compare Iran and Israel in the last 70 years, Israel has turned from a yellow country to a green one and Iran has turned from a green country into a yellow country.
The water resources of the people of Iran have gone from, let's say, possibly 13,000 cubic metres per person to around 1,000 cubic metres per person because of bad agriculture and food production policies, and not just because of the sanctions. It started with the ideology of Ayatollah Khomeini. He wanted to confront every country in the world and believed that we can use whatever resources we have to have a bigger population.
Ayatollah Khomeini said a few years ago that the population needs to reach 150 million, while we don't have enough water resources for 50 million. You can see that Iran doesn't need external enemies when it has the regime actually destroying its natural resources.
I want to compare Israel and Iran. Many people in Israel understand the value of water, but still in Iran people in cities, who have enjoyed having very good tap water, do not understand what people in other parts of the country and rural areas are facing. There's a big gap between people in major cities and in rich neighbourhoods and the people in rural areas who have lost their farmlands because of the regime's policies and bad water management.
The sad story is that many revolutionaries who were involved in all these food production policies became very rich and are living in multimillion-dollar mansions, and their children, some of them, are living in Canada, and people are suffering inside the country. There's this big gap.
We are trying to raise awareness. We are trying to inform the public about what they could do, but it's still not enough. We really need the help of nations such as Canada, with a good environmental report card.