A legacy of salt in uzbekistan

Salt crunches underfoot like frosty soil on this bare stretch of land in horse opera Republic of Uzbekistan.

"Thirty years ago, this was a cotton wool field," said a 61-year-old farmer who has lived near this city all his life. "Now it's a salt flat."

Republic of Uzbekistan, a landlocked country that was once part of the Soviet Union, is home to one of the biggest man-made catastrophe in history. For decennary its rivers were diverted to grow cotton wool on arid land, causation the Aral Sea, a large seawater lake, to lose more than half of its surface area in 40 years.

But old habits are hard to break and, 17 years after the Soviet Union collapsed, cotton is still king and the environmental destruction continues unabated, film editing into crop yields. Uzbekistan is the world's second-largest cotton exporter after the United States, drawing a third of its foreign currency net income from the crop, but that position seems progressively threatened by corruptness, poor planning and the debasement of cropland.

Far less money is spent now on maintaining the vast networks of water drain and irrigation that cross the state than was expended under communism. The authorization spend about $12 a hectare on care, down from $120 a hectare in Soviet times, according to the International Water direction Institute. Blocked drainage pipes push salt degree up, damaging the land and dragging crop yields ever lower.

A United Nations study in 2001 estimated that 46 percentage of Republic of Uzbekistan's irrigated lands have been damaged by salt, up from 38 percentage in 1982 and 42 percentage in 1995.

"The bringing system is dilapidated, the drain system is weakness," said one foreign expert, who asked that his name not be used because he has to work with Uzbek functionary. "It is a big job."

How that has affected cotton production is a difficult question. Cotton and its production are ensnared in politics, so national statistics on it are scarce. But a pattern of decline in the industry was evident in three regions based on local figures provided to The New York Times.

In Karakalpakstan, the region that contains what is left of the Aral Sea, the total area of land under cultivation has dropped by 14 percent since 1991, according to local statistics. In the Bukhara region in the south, land planted with cotton has declined by 15 percent in the last eight years and in Jizzax, a region in central Uzbekistan, 15 percent of the cultivated land has become too salty to farm.

In Manghit, a small city near Khujayli, an early sign of saltiness came in the 1980s when mushrooms that had grown along the banks of the mighty Amu Darya River began to disappear, a local farmer recalled. Soil that used to grow 4.5 tons of raw cotton, measured with seeds and stems, a hectare now produces 2.5 tons and in some places as little as 1.3 tons, said the farmer, who asked that his name not be used because Uzbek authorities frown on people speaking to foreign journalists.

"When you see this salt, sad, dark thoughts take you," he said, explaining that the salt is what is left when water evaporates after intense irrigation. "Nothing grows on salty land. It's like standing on a graveyard."

Uzbekistan's environmental problems date from the 1950s, when Nikita Khrushchev ramped up industrial agriculture, diverting river flows into a vast new maze of industrial-size canals. Slowly, the land began to change.

The farmer in Khujayli recalled a car trip with his father in the winter of 1954 near the city of Muynoq that began with a crossing of kilometers of Aral Sea ice. Now the shore is more than 80 kilometers, or 50 miles, away from the city. In the 1970s, his grandfather's apricot trees died. Salt eats away at shoes here and turns bricks white.

"For so many years we raped the land," said the farmer. "This is the result."

Sharing dwindling water resources is a maddening post-Soviet puzzle.

Central Asia, once a single part in the Soviet machine, is now five countries with competing interests. Uzbekistan, the most populous, depends on its neighbor Kyrgyzstan for water. This year will be dry, Uzbek farmers and officials said, because Kyrgyzstan used more of its water than usual to generate electricity for heat last winter, which was unseasonably cold.

Environmental woes, however, are only part of the problem.

Uzbekistan's farming industry is still largely frozen in its Soviet past. Though the industry was rearranged several years ago to break the Soviet-era collective farms into private plots, the price paid for cotton is still set by the government, as are the quotas for how much to grow. The state price is set at less than one quarter of the world market price.