Old Farming Habits Leave Uzbekistan a Legacy of Salt

[WhiteTara]

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/15/world/asia/15uzbek.html
The New York Times


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

Uzbekistan, a land-locked country that was once part of the Soviet Union, is home to one of the biggest man-made disasters in history. For decades its rivers were diverted to grow cotton on arid land, causing the Aral Sea, a large saltwater 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, cutting into crop yields. Uzbekistan is the world’s second-largest cotton exporter after the United States, drawing a third of its foreign currency earnings from the crop, but that status seems increasingly threatened by corruption, poor planning and the degradation of cropland.

Far less money is spent now on maintaining the vast networks of water drainage and irrigation that crisscross the country than was expended under Communism. Authorities spend about $12 per hectare on maintenance (a hectare is around two and a half acres), down from $120 per hectare in Soviet times, according to the International Water Management Institute. Blocked drainage pipes push salt levels up, damaging the land and dragging crop yields ever lower.

snip

“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 S. Khrushchev ramped up industrial agriculture, diverting river flows into a vast new maze of industrial-size canals. Slowly, the land began to change.

snip

“We are destroying ourselves,” said the 61-year-old farmer in Khujayli. “Why are we planting cotton, and what are we getting from it? We never ask those questions.”

[Joanne98]

1. More capitalist destruction.

Far less money is spent now on maintaining the vast networks of water drainage and irrigation that crisscross the country than was expended under Communism. Authorities spend about $12 per hectare on maintenance (a hectare is around two and a half acres), down from $120 per hectare in Soviet times, according to the International Water Management Institute. Blocked drainage pipes push salt levels up, damaging the land and dragging crop yields ever lower.

[SoCalDem]

2. Real farmers know that first you grow YOUR food

then your livestock's food..and only THEN do you grow cash-crops...

If you do it in that order, your fields will always produce.. If you concentrate on cash-crops, you are always susceptible to push your land beyond what it can handle..