The Land of Cotton: Uzbekistan, Not Dixie

KHIVA. When I was a kid, National Geographic published a book called Inside the Soviet Union. Its chapter on Central Asia explained the marvels of the Kara Kum canal which brought water to the desert and allowed cotton farms to flourish here. As it turns out, rather than a modern marvel, the book described an ecological nightmare.

Cotton is a thirsty crop, requiring lots of water, so it is seemingly not a natural crop for a desert country like Uzbekistan. Yet the Soviets made Central Asia a center for cotton growth and the Uzbekistan still depends on it for most of its export earnings. Bukhara and Khiva are both surrounded by lots of cotton fields. I saw a literal mountain of cotton as I passed through Urgench traveling between the two cities.

Most of the Amu Darya river is diverted into canals in order in order to feed the thirsty cotton. The results were obvious when we saw the Amu Darya. The riverbed, which formerly filled a wide valley, was mostly dry as the photo shows. In some years, no water reaches the Aral Sea which has been drying up for decades. As Chasing the Sea, an interesting piece of travel lit about Uzbekistan, describes in riveting detail, the country’s major fishing port, Muynak, is now tens of miles from what is left of the sea.

The overuse of pesticides has heavily contaminated both the Amu Darya, the Aral Sea, and the water table of the whole region. The problem is exacerbated by the shrinking of the Aral Sea because salt from the exposed seabed is blown all throughout Central Asia, leading some to talk of a new "white desert" around the former sea. Climate change in the area in accelerating as the Aral no longer moderates the extreme heat of summer or cold of winter.

I saw a few fishermen trying their luck near the pontoon bridge over the Amu Darya. However, I wouldn’t dream of eating their catch as the river is a chemical soup. I suppose the one consolation of the Amu Darya’s demise is that the pontoon bridge doesn’t have to float much—a good thing given its poor state of repair. The bridge has metal patches on patches.

I suspect that is little consolation to the people of Karakalpakstan, the region of Uzbekistan closest to what is left of the Aral. The region has experienced an ongoing health crisis of catastrophic proportions due to the poisons in the air and water. While the damage is severe, the change is not irreversible. Kazakhstan has put a dike between the northern and southern part of the Aral Sea and the Little Aral, as it is known, is filling up again and now even supports a fishing industry.

However, neither Uzbekistan nor other countries in the region have the will to greatly reduce the acreage dedicated to cotton growth—a necessary step to increase the flow of water in the Amu Darya. It is too lucrative for the elites and there is no substitute industry it and the employment it generates, though many of the people who work in the cotton fields live much like serfs. Schools are even closed and children dragooned to work in the fields. Cotton is still picked by hand in Uzbekistan.