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WATER POLITICS

In the latest SAISPHERE 2008, John Daly details more about the most severe conundrum facing Central Asian nations: water.  As the report notes:

The implosion of the U.S.S.R. in December 1991 sundered a country of 15 constituent republics into 15 new nations, which were immediately faced with the consequences of the dissolution of an economically autarkic state. Particularly hard hit were Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, forced to address the problems of reforming their economies to transit to a national sovereign model after being constituent Soviet republics, yoked to the demands of the Soviet Union’s centrally planned economy.

Of all the regional economic readjustments that the ’Stans have had to make, the most intractable is reaching common accord on sharing the region’s limited water resources. While Soviet efforts to divert Central Asian water toward agriculture began in 1918 to gain a market share in the global cotton trade, the building of a massive network of irrigation projects began in the 1940s, launching a sustained agricultural development program that was to last to the end of the Soviet era and beyond.

Water issues stretch from Turkmenistan bordering the Caspian in the west to the mountainous alpine glaciers and rivers of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, whose waters are initially used to power hydroelectric stations in the two energy-poor nations before being released to agrarian nations downstream.

The largest single regional unresolved issue concerning Central Asian water is the equitable division of the waters of Central Asia’s two most important rivers, the 1,500-mile-long Amu Darya and the 1,380-mile-long Syr Darya, whose combined flow before massive Soviet agricultural projects were implemented equaled the Nile. The Amu Darya, Central Asia’s longest river, rises in Tajikistan’s Pamir mountain range along its border with Afghanistan, while the Syr Darya originates in Kyrgyzstan’s portion of the Tien Shan mountain range and eastern Uzbekistan. The Syr Darya flows south and westward across Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan before draining into the Aral Sea, while the Amu Darya flows on a more southerly route through Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan before debouching in the Aral.

The rivers together contain more than 90 percent of Central Asia’s available water resources. Their headwaters are initially controlled by Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, the two poorest ’Stans, even as Uzbekistan’s extensive cotton and agricultural irrigation alone account for more than half of the region’s water consumption.

Aquatic Disasters

Shortly after independence, the five countries agreed to maintain the Soviet-era water quota system, but competing national needs rendered the agreement unworkable. Further aggravating problems surrounding the headwaters of the Amu Darya and Syr Darya, in the wake of the 1992–97 Tajik Civil War and the decline of Kyrgyzstan’s economy, aquatic facilities fell into disrepair. Following inde-pendence, Central Asian leaders recognized the problem of developing a new, post-Soviet regional water policy; in 1993 the Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Tajik, Turkmen and Uzbek presidents established the Interstate Commission for Water Coordination to harmonize their water policies. But while the ICWC has since held 50 meetings, little has been accomplished; in the ensuring vacuum, each nation has increasingly developed nationalist policies, often to the detriment of its neighbors.

The failure to develop a coordinated approach while staying wedded to fraying Soviet-era water policies is most dramatically illustrated in the shrinkage of the Aral Sea. The Aral was once the world’s fourth-largest inland sea with an area of 28,000 square miles. Its slow demise began in the early 1960s, when massive Soviet Central Asian canal projects siphoned off increasing amounts of the Amu Darya’s and Syr Darya’s waters into inefficiently irrigated fields; where increasing demands of diverted water for cotton production occurred in Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The rising diversion of the rivers’ waters eventually shrank the Aral Sea to approximately 8,920 square miles, separating it into the northern “Small Sea” in Kazakhstan and the southern “Large Sea” in Uzbekistan, while the toxic saline and fertilizer-laced wastelands uncovered by the sea’s retreat blew throughout Eurasia. The amount of water taken from the Amu Darya and Syr Darya doubled between 1960 and 2000, allowing cotton production to nearly double in the same period, paralleling the Aral’s decline.

In the same year the ICWC was founded, the ’Stans also created the Interstate Council for the Aral Sea, which in turn produced the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea to seek funding for restoration activities under the rubric of the Aral Sea Basin Program 1. While ASBP 1 initially attracted some foreign investment, the scale of the problem subsequently combined with charges of poor management, resulting in a drying up of foreign funding. The program is now essentially moribund, leaving it with a track record as inefficient as the ICWC’s.

In 2005, petrodollar-rich Kazakhstan constructed the Kokaral Dike between the northern “Small” Aral Sea and the south “Large” Aral Sea, which provided for a partial revival of the northern branch by helping conserve the Syr Darya’s inflow, producing rising water depths and a return of some fish stocks. The larger environmental implications of the Aral’s desiccation remain, however, and there has been no parallel Uzbek effort for the “Large” Aral.

While the Aral Sea’s ecological trauma is the region’s best-known aquatic disaster, other problems are increasing. Uzbekistan’s Syrdarya state biological inspection chief Ablyakim Abirov recently told a regional news agency that in 2008 the Syr Darya’s water flow is 10 percent of its 2007 level, endangering aquatic biodiversity because shoals of river fish can not swim to their spawning grounds. This sentiment was echoed by Tajikistan’s Soghd environmental committee member Gafurdzhon Karimov, who estimates that nearly half of the Syr Darya’s fish population can not produce offspring as a result of lowered water levels.

Imperfect Solutions

Unfortunately for Central Asia, Western governmental interest in the region has primarily focused on its energy and military resources (especially America after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001), leaving developmental issues such as water largely in the hands of international organizations such as the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. The legacy of the U.S.S.R. has left regional economies distorted, as they were originally intended to produce cotton for the Soviet Union’s overall needs even as they neglected local issues. This situation continues 17 years after independence, as the region’s governments continue to expand production while devoting fewer and fewer resources to infrastructure.

International organizations such as the International Water Association’s recent Sixth World Water Congress in Vienna are valuable forums for discussing Central Asian needs, but unfortunately they must compete with other worsening situations in Asia, Africa and the Middle East.

Regional tensions have been rising as water-rich but energy-poor Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan attempt to barter their aquatic resources for energy imports, a dilemma described in a recent article in the Kyrgyz Vechernyi Bishkek newspaper as “a box with valuables on a powder keg.”

Ironically, the region’s increasing thirst for water to sustain its agricultural development has revived an idea first floated more than 40 years ago. Promising a relatively quick and permanent if expensive solution, Moscow Mayor Iuri Luzhkov, first in December 2002 and again this year, has rejuvenated one of the U.S.S.R.’s last and most megalomaniacal projects: a scheme to divert a portion of Siberia’s Ob River southward via a 1,400-mile-long canal from Khanty-Mansiisk to the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers. The canal is intended to relieve Central Asia’s chronic water shortages, delivering 25 cubic kilometers of water annually to Sirdaryo in Uzbekistan. Initial estimates of the gargantuan project run $25 billion to $30 billion, but Russian government supporters estimate that water sales to Central Asia could generate $5 billion in revenue annually for the Russian Federation budget. Luzhov’s proposal has the enthusiastic support of two Central Asian leaders: Kazakh President Nursultan Nazarbayev and Uzbek President Islom Karimov.

The canal proposal is a perfect marriage of Kremlin greed and Central Asian need allied to lingering Soviet megalomania among bureaucrats in the post-Soviet space. During the Soviet era the Central Asian republics freely traded water and energy resources, while subsidies from Moscow paid for the upkeep of the region’s aquatic infrastructure. While water use since 1991 has grown, investment has declined, with a recent World Bank study estimating that nearly 60 percent of the water intended for farms does not reach the fields.

The Siberian waters may further contaminate the Central Asian environment, already harshly impacted by salinization, overzealous use of pesticides and industrial wastes. The waters of the Ob are heavily polluted by nearby oil fields, but its environmental shortcomings pale into insignificance compared with one of its tributaries, the Tom River. The Tom flows through the Siberian Chemical Combine at Tomsk-7, or Seversk, formerly one of the world’s largest nuclear weapons production facilities. A Russian Federation Security Council report states that the radioactive waste within Seversk’s industrial zone generates approximately 44,000 petabecquerels of radioactivity; the April 1986 Chernobyl disaster released 80 petabecquerels of cesium, strontium, plutonium and other radioactive materials into the environment. Eight years ago Russian and U.S. scientists concluded that the level of radioactive contamination in the Tom and Romashka rivers is the highest in the world.

The Squabbling ’Stans

Today, all five ’Stans are locked into an annual cycle of disagreements. Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan seek increased water for their rising agricultural sectors and burgeoning populations. At the same time, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan, the weakest of the regional economies, seek both recompense for their aquatic assets or energy barter arrangements even as energy shortfalls force them to use more water for power generation in the winter, causing releases and flooding downstream.

Uzbekistan also alleges that Turkmenistan is diverting too much of the Amu Darya to its detriment, while Kazakhstan makes similar charges against Uzbekistan over its diversion of the Syr Darya’s flow. Seeking possible economic leverage, both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan charge that the three downstream countries are all exceeding quotas.

Nor is there indication the impasse will be broken soon. Trilateral negotiations held in September in Almaty between Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan over the Syr Darya’s water resources were inconclusive. Kyrgyzstan insisted on refilling its depleted Toktogul reservoir, stating that it would only agree to increasing its water discharges if Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan agreed to assist it with shipments of oil and gas, demands rejected by both Tashkent and Astana. Kazakhstan disagreed with Uzbek proposals for water distribution, as they did not take droughts into account, and maintained that modifying earlier agreements over water reached in the early 1990s would require further amendment of the relevant legislative acts. In light of such intractable differences, it seems unlikely the three countries will reach common accord during the next round of negotiations.

The choices facing Central Asia are stark and have been building for nearly two decades. Fundamental agricultural reform is long overdue, and governments must both make the requisite investments in aquatic infrastructure and diversify away from the cotton monoculture. Governments soliciting foreign infrastructure investment must be willing to reduce bureaucratic red tape and provide greater administrative accountability and transparency. Regional compromise over transnational river water assets, a finite resource, must replace increasingly hard-line nationalistic positions prognosticated on Soviet-era legacies of ever-increasing agricultural quotas. A regionwide system of reservoirs transcending national borders should be developed, and creative fiscal and barter arrangements linking water and energy at subsidized prices should be a high priority.

Finally, the Central Asian governments must resist the seductive “quick fix” being peddled by Moscow for an aquatic dinosaur if they wish to avoid permanent economic servitude to the Kremlin. For example, Russia estimates it could earn $5 billion annually from Central Asian water sales; as Uzbekistan’s water use is more than 50 percent of the regional total, Tashkent’s annual tab for Siberian water would total $2.5 billion. As the CIA estimated Uzbekistan’s gross domestic product at the official exchange rate in 2007 at $22.31 billion, water imports would quickly consume more than 10 percent of its annual budget, without factoring in the canal’s construction costs. As Tashkent receives approximately $1 billion per annum for its cotton exports, Russian water would hardly be a bargain unless production were dramatically increased.

According to an Aral proverb, “In every drop of water there is a grain of gold.” If Central Asia’s governments cannot resolve their internecine disputes and instead grasp Russia’s offer, then it is their gold that will flow northward for every drop of Siberian water for the foreseeable future.”