Via The Foreign Policy Association, a report that – in advance of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea meeting in Almaty on April 28 – Uzbekistan’s President, Islam Karimov, has been busy convincing Turkmenistan’s President, Gurbangly Berdymukhamedov, to ally with the downstream Central Asian states against the upstream ones. As the article notes:
“…The Syr Darya and Amu Darya are the only sources for water in the Aral Sea. The upstream countries would like to harness some of that energy while the downstream countries worry about not having enough water for their irrigation-intensive cotton fields. This is a situation that constantly causes misery to all involved, but a solution is not easy. The five states need to figure out how to share their water but for the foreseeable future, their populations will continue to suffer from a lack of clean water, ecological security, adequate energy supplies, and various other instabilities.
