Registan.net

While looking around online for more up to date information regarding the Aral Sea, I found a couple images to share.  They both come from Oriental Express, which is more a tourism advancement site than one dedicated to water management or Central Asian scholarship.  Still, I hadn’t seen either of these images before.  I am largely at the whim of Google’s search engine, so I’d appreciate any leads on Aral scholarship from the readers.

The first image seems to be a very optimistic projection of Aral Sea shorelines made in 1998.  In that picture, the Aral had only split into two seas, as opposed to the almost four different bodies of water that now exist, with the lower three connected by narrow channels.  It’s disappearing very quickly, and the rate of its disappearance is perhaps not the primary issue.

Water management in Central Asia is certainly the culprit, whether under Soviet or post-Soviet leadership.  The same practices that drained the sea in the first place are still in place; unsound irrigation practices, outdated irrigation infrastructure [silted up canals, malfunctioning gates], poor crop and land management, and the corruption that allows water to be controlled by those upstream without representation from those downstream.
Irrigation mismanagement led to the creation of Lake Aydarkul, north of Jizzax, Uzbekistan.  The Karakum canal continues to draw off most of the water from the Amu Darya, largely to supply subsistence farmers in the desert and the state’s cotton crop.  The Ili river continues to be increasingly drawn on for Chinese development, as Kazakhstan’s Lake Balkhash pays the price and continues to dry up.  Pollution and overfishing have led to massive extinctions in Balkhash, a tragic turn that copies the early death throes of the Aral Sea.  This is not news, of course.

However, this is the kind of thing that doesn’t hold our media-savvy attention spans like it should.

Still, this report that came out in 2004 is overdue for an update, as the losses in Balkhash deserve more attention than the Aral, if only because this a problem that has yet to become the ‘Lost Cause’ the Aral is.  The report is a must-read - the information is very easy to access, and the explanations are very clear.

I know what Registan is and what it isn’t.  I’m not doing anything more than trying to be that nagging voice in the back of the room that reminds you that trees and lakes don’t defend themselves very well.  The mismanagement of water resources that caused the Aral Sea tragedy continue, and that’s the straight truth.  Besides diverting the Ili for industrial and Residential growth, it doesn’t hurt to point out that the main cash crop grown by irrigation in these areas is also cotton.  Not in the astronomic amounts grown in Uzbekistan, but still.  There are perhaps better things to grow, and if there were free markets, perhaps the farmers would chose to grow something more profitable and more sustainable.  The fact remains that when the state says they will put a stop to this mismanagement, it’s important to remember how much they profit from the status quo.

For example, Uzbekistan buys cotton from the ‘free’ farmers at set prices, and then sells this cotton to foreign firms at world market prices, making serious profits, all in hard, foreign currency.  If they in turn were spending this money on the farmers, much would be forgiven - provide better health care, farming infrastructure, and an updated and more efficient irrigation system.

The amount of water wasted, if recuperated, would be most useful to those farmers.  Similarly, a government program on economically and ecologically feasible methods of desalinization of crop-lands suffering from chronic over-irrigation would be possible with those funds taken from cotton farmers when they are forced to sell their cotton to the state.  Naturally, these shirkat farmers, the successors to Soviet collective farms, have their own reasons to maintain the status quo.

And before I finish this rant, might I remind the reader that water is free to farmers in Central Asia, despite the fact that precious little of it is coming from the sky.  Free resources exist in free markets only in instances of absolute abundance.  Scarcity necessitates a price, and until that happens, water will remain a wasted resource.  Key example - the subsidized free gas available in Turkmenistan has led to people leaving their stoves burning all day to save money on matches.  Matches.  This isn’t exclusively natural gas, as gasoline is likewise free to the consumer.  These practices, if not the root the problem, certainly make it difficult to come up with effective measures to improve the situation.

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