Man-Made Drought Wreaks Havoc in Karakalpakstan
David Kohn: 2/26/01

People in Karakalpakstan have a saying: those upstream drink water, those downstream drink poison. This year, many people there don’t have much to drink at all. Karakalpakstan, the semi-autonomous republic that makes up the western third of Uzbekistan, is in the midst of a severe drought, the worst that anyone can remember. A largely rural region with a population of around 1.5 million, Karakalpakstan depends heavily on agriculture. The drought has decimated its two main crops, rice and cotton.

"The drought is a disaster for the Karakalpak economy," says Rashid Toreshov, Karakalpakstan’s deputy Water Minister. A harried man whose desk sits under a large, imposing portrait of Uzbek president Islam Karimov, Toreshov says the effects will extend far beyond farming: "Most of our industries are based on agriculture."

What makes this drought unusual is that it is man-made. Like most of Uzbekistan, Karakalpakstan depends on irrigation to sustain agriculture. In the 60s and 70s, the Soviet Union built a massive irrigation system that took water from the Amu Darya River, which begins in the Pamir Mountains in Tajikistan and flows west, eventually reaching Karakalpakstan. Central Asia is an arid region, and the irrigation system greatly increased the amount of arable land. Cotton production in particular improved enormously. (One casualty of this system has been the Aral Sea, which lies at the terminus of the Amu Darya as well as the Syr Darya, another river used as a source of irrigation water. With almost all the water diverted for irrigation, the Sea has shrunk to half its former size.) "When you talk about drought you’re not talking about rain. Because it hardly ever rains there," says Peter Sinnott, a Columbia University geographer who specializes in Central Asia. "The rains don’t come anyway. It’s irrigated agriculture."

This year though, water didn’t make its way to Karakalpakstan. For all of Central Asia, this was a dry year. Less rain than usual fell throughout the region, and less water than usual melted from the glaciers in the Pamir Mountains. Afghanistan and Tajikistan, which don’t have extensive irrigation systems, have suffered serious drought as well. Despite this shortage, many Uzbek agricultural areas had relatively normal yields. But in Karakalpakstan, the fields "burned up," as one regional official said.

What happened? Karakalpakstan lies at the end of this system, furthest downstream; in other words, it is last in line. According to knowledgeable sources, upstream regions took more than their fair share of water from the system, leaving Karakalpakstan to wither. Sinnott says this practice is not unusual: "It’s nothing new. Why bother to say it?" But in a dry year, there was no extra water for Karakalpakstan.

According to the regional authorities, Karakalpakstan planted 115,000 hectares of rice. Less than 10 percent survived. The 125,000 hectares of cotton produced less than half the normal yield. Toreshov says that Karakalpakstan needs 3.4 billion cubic meters of water for its fields. It got less than a billion, just 27 percent of what it needed.

Some suggest that the Karakalpakstan, a poor, politically weak region, has suffered from ethnic discrimination. Traditionally nomadic, Karakalpaks are much more closely related to Kazakhs than to the more sedentary Uzbeks. "The Karakalpaks are the ultimate losers," says Sinnott. "They’re non-Uzbeks in a nationalist country. They’ve had a tough time of it."

But most observers blame the shortage on upstream regions’ greed for water. "The Karakalpaks are really at the end of the line," says Daene McKinney, an environmental engineer who has studied the region’s water problems. "I don’t think it’s some kind of political decision to cheat them out of water. I think it’s more a function of simple geography: the Karakalpaks are downstream."

Driving through heavily agricultural northeast Karakalpakstan, one sees dry irrigation canals everywhere. One day last fall, Kushkin Azerevich, an official in the Karakalpak Ministry of Water, took a visitor to a regional pump station outside the village of Tartakupir. The station is a sort of small dam that feeds water into a system of smaller canals. Normally filled with water, it had almost none. The canals extending from it were completely dry. Several hundred acres of rice and cotton depend on these canals.

Among those fields are those of Muyadin Mahabetov. Last spring, Mahabetov, a farmer who lives outside Tartakupir, planted 80 hectares of rice. Without water, none survived. "Water is our living," Mahabetov said. He lost seven million sums, which is about $9,000. In a place where an average monthly salary is $10, this is a staggering amount. Rumors abound that thousands have fled the region, unable to survive. Mahabetov says that he knows seven families in his district who moved to Kazakhstan. "There are mass movements of people," says Dennis Falzon, a researcher with Doctors Without Borders, which is providing help for the drought.

The problems extend beyond agriculture. Drinking water has also become scarce, and many wells have dried up. Many Karakalpaks must get their drinking water from drainage canals, which are almost always dangerously contaminated with bacteria and chemicals. (Drainage canals, which collect water after it nourishes the fields, have not gone dry. Ironically, the region continues to suffer from a surfeit of sub-surface drainage water, which can drown roots and kill crops.) In the evenings, the roads are filled with people toting jugs and buckets to and from these canals. In one district Falzon studied, diarrheal disease increased seven fold over the previous year. Such diseases, which kill hundreds of Karakalpak children every year, are usually spread through contaminated drinking water.

The lean harvests will also hurt people in other ways. Cottonseed oil is a staple of the local diet, and with supplies low, prices have risen sharply. And in rural areas, many depend on cotton plant stems for cooking and heating during the winter. The leftovers from the rice harvest are usually fed to cattle in the winter.

This fall, Falzon produced a report on the drought. Many farmers told him they had slaughtered livestock because the animals were dying of thirst. For people living close to the bone, such a decision is not taken lightly. "When you kill a cow it has implications for the future, because a cow usually produces more cows, and it also provides milk," says Falzon. "If you kill it you’ve lost a major asset."

The drought has already affected next year’s crop. In the fall, the fields must be "washed" -- flooded to remove the salt that constantly accumulates on the surface of this former seabed. But there is no water, so the fields will not be ready even if water is plentiful in spring. "Officials come, they hold meetings and conferences," says Azerevich. "But nothing much seems to happen."

Over the past two decades, Karakalpakstan has had more than its share of troubles, many of them related to water. As the Aral Sea shrank, the region’s fishing industry collapsed, throwing 100,000 people out of work. As the water retreated, it left behind two million acres of dried seabed. These flats are encrusted with huge amounts of toxic fertilizers and pesticides (including DDT) -- runoff from the fields. Increasingly frequent dust storms have spread millions of tons of this poison throughout the region.

The toxins are almost certainly contributing to severe health problems throughout the Aral region. The district’s death rate from respiratory illness is among the world's highest. In some areas, 95% of pregnant women suffer from anemia; birth defects and cancer occur at alarming rates. "You’ve got a problem area to begin with," says McKinney. "Then you add this drought on top of that. They’re getting kicked while they’re down."

Many observers say that Karakalpakstan has little hope of getting the water it needs. "Each year there are 400,000 new hungry mouths just in Uzbekistan," said one researcher, referring to the country's high birth rate. "The rest of the country will need more water. And not just Uzbekistan: Tajikistan, Krygyzstan, Afghanistan, these are also upstream. What do you think? Will they give water to Karakalpakstan?"

Editor’s Note: David Kohn is a journalist. He recently returned from Uzbekistan, where he was a Pew Fellow in International Journalism.

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Posted February 26, 2001 © Eurasianet
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