Land and Water Politics in Uzbekistan
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TITLE: Land and Water Politics in Uzbekistan AUTHOR : Don Van Atta THE NATIONAL COUNCI L FOR SOVIET AND EAST EUROPEA N RESEARC H 1755 Massachusetts Avenue, N .W . Washington, D.C . 20036 COPYRIGHT This paper was not produced under Council contract. It has been volunteered to the Council by the author under a limited release of copyright to the Council and to th e United States Government for internal use and reproduction, but not for publication by either. Land and Water Politics in Uzbekistan Don Van Atta Draft - please do not quote or cite without permission Summary This is a trip report based on the author's participation in a conference supported by the U.S . Department of State in Tashkent as well as on field observations in the Fergan a Valley of Uzbekistan . Uzbekistan is still a highly protected cotton colony but its agriculture is facing th e same structural and organizational problems, and the same need to change, as agriculture i n the rest of the former Soviet Union . How long this kind of compromise can hold together is very much in doubt . iii Land and Water Politics i n Uzbekistan* Don Van Atta Draft - please do not quote or cite without permission For anyone familiar with the immense changes Russia has undergone since 1989, a visit to Uzbekistan creates the sensation of having fallen into a time warp . Such, at least , was this writer's feeling during a week-long stay for a conference on water management and agricultural development in post-Soviet Central Asia organized by the East-West Center with support from the US Department of State . The conference, like a previous meeting in Phoenix, Arizona in 1992, had tw o complementary objectives . On the one hand, it aimed to bring together a group of America n Sovietologists and other academic specialists to focus on a regional problem, as well a s issues of one economic sector, agriculture, in comparative perspective . On the other hand , the conference sought to educate Central Asians, particularly the Uzbeks who are the mos t populous people in the region and its main water consumers, in comparative experiences i n international river basin management . Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Central Asian water management has been transformed from an issue in which the main axis o f conflict pitted Moscow against the Central Asians and Moscow ultimately resolved conflict s among the republics into a matter of international relations among the region's new state s themselves . World experience suggests that equitable solutions to international issues similar to the allocation of Central Asian water generally require an effort by the internationa l The author wishes to acknowledge with gratitude editorial assistance provided by NCSEER . 2 community and outside mediation .' That the East-West Center is not alone in this view was shown by the simultaneous conduct, also in Tashkent, of a World Bank-sponsored conferenc e intended to persuade Uzbek authorities of the need to adopt a comprehensive plan to limit the damage caused by the continuing desiccation of the Aral Sea, a national water-managemen t strategy, and an inventory of water-management networks and needs in the country . The Situation in Uzbekista n Uzbekistan, like the other states of former Soviet Central Asia, gained its indepen- dence as a result of the collapse of the USSR following the abortive coup of August 1991 . The Uzbek republic was a creation of the Moscow authorities. The country's very bound- aries resulted from Moscow's decisions to create several republics out of Soviet Turkestan i n the early 1930s, and those borders leave a substantial Uzbek population at the entrance to th e Fergana Valley, the richest agricultural district in all of Central Asia, formally citizens o f Tadzhikistan . Since the 1930s, Moscow directed Uzbek development primarily to ensure itself a supply of cotton for Russian textile mills. Central Asian agriculture has always been based on irrigation—the main canal feeding one of the farms the East-West Center group visite d had been constructed three centuries earlier and some of the water works in the Fergan a Valley are reputed to be two millennia old . But starting in the early 1960s, additional vast 1See Gregory Gleason, "The Struggle Over Water in Central Asia : Republican Sover- eignty and Collective Action," Report on the USSR (June 21, 1991), pp . 11-19 ; Gleason , "Water and Land Conflict among the New States of Central Asia," analytical brief of project report to the National Council for Soviet and East European Research, contract number 806 - 13 (unpublished, November 1992) . 3 amounts of irrigation water were drawn from the region's two major rivers, the Amu Dar'i a and Syr Dar'ia, to increase the cultivated area and particularly cotton production . The logical result of the emphasis on cotton at all costs was monoculture and eventually enormou s scandals as a result of Uzbek first secretary Sharaf Rashidov's promises to increase cotton production by twenty percent in the early 1970s . Rashidov failed to increase production, bu t reported output, as well as payments to a corrupt Uzbek elite for that "increase," did grow . Growing demands for water for cotton and rice cultivation cut the annual inflow into the landlocked Aral Sea, some 56 cubic kilometers of water in the wet year of 1960, to 42 .5 cubic kilometers in 1973, 8 .3 cubic kilometers by 1980, and zero by 1982 . Now river wate r flows into the Sea only in unusually wet years such as 1992, when about 4 cubic kilometer s reached the rivers' mouths. The Aral Sea began to dry up, splitting into two much smaller , much saltier bodies of water by the 1980s . The surrounding area was officially defined as a disaster area as a result of salt and dust storms from the dry sea bed, environmental pollutio n from irrigation run-off from upstream areas, and a general lack of investment in and attentio n to public health, housing and infrastructure . The Soviet planners' insistence on maximum cotton output at all costs had additiona l evil effects familiar from other colonial situations . The party's ability to mobilize urban populations to provide cheap hand labor made agricultural mechanization a low priority . It was cheaper for farm managers to dragoon vast armies of manual pickers than to make Soviet cotton combines, scarce, expensive, unreliable and prone like all machines to overloo k some cotton that hand pickers would harvest work properly . The availability of seasonal work in the countryside, and the need for casual labor, helped to preserve a large rural 4 population, leading to overcrowded living conditions in the countryside and contributing t o population problems . But the use of enormous amounts of agricultural chemicals, includin g defoliants to aid in picking by stripping leaves from the plants made working conditions fo r the corvee labor very unsafe, contributing directly to a disastrous rate of infant mortality an d birth defects. Education suffered as school children spent as much as four months of eac h academic year in the fields as part of their "training ." (Students at the Pedagogical Institute in Dzhizhak were particularly interested when, during the Center group's visit, the America n visitors told them that students in the U .S . were not required to do such labor .) Even food supplies suffered . With every inch of available land planted to cotton, peasants had to feed themselves from their private plots . Low rural incomes led them to sell much of what they did produce in the cities, creating an impression of abundance in the urban bazaars often no t supported by villagers' appearance, health, or physical characteristics . 2 The Soviet-era Uzbek leadership hoped for, and repeatedly demanded, a technological "quick fix" to their problems through the construction of vast water diversion projects intended to reverse Siberia's north-flowing rivers. Indeed, water planners by the mid-1970 s were expanding irrigated acreages on the assumption that Siberian water would be available . However, many Russians bitterly opposed the Siberian schemes, which became a focus o f some of the first political groups formed during perestroika, and the USSR in any cas e lacked the capital to build such grandiose projects . Although local water planners told th e 2 The issue of food sufficiency for the Uzbek rural population is being investigated i n more detail in a current study by Peter Craumer of Florida International University, a conference participant . 5 conference they still hoped for massive diversion from Siberia or the Caspian Sea, such works will not—and probably should not—be constructed in time to save the Aral . Because they understand that such a technological "quick fix" is unlikely and even undesirable , reduction in the area planted to cotton, action to save the Aral Sea, and measures to develo p the countryside have been the key points in all Uzbek opposition movements' platforms . Agrarian Reform in Uzbekistan In 1990, Uzbekistan had some 940 kolkhozy and 1,108 sovkhozy . In mid-summer of that year the republic adopted a Law on Land, which, like its all-union model adopted thre e months earlier, permitted individuals to hold land for private plots and individual farms on long-term lease (arenda) or usufruct (pol'zovanie) and allowed tenure to be inherited bu t forbade private ownership of agricultural land .' In 1990 and 1991, about one-half millio n hectares of arable land were distributed for use as private plots or individual farms, so tha t now about 550,000 hectares are worked as household plots. According to Uzbek Academ y of Agricultural Sciences President Said Usmanov, the country now has about four millio n hectares of irrigated agricultural land altogether .