MONGABAY.COM
Mongabay.com seeks to raise interest in and appreciation of wild lands and wildlife, while examining the impact of emerging trends in climate, technology, economics, and finance on conservation and development (more)
WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
|
|
Tajikistan
Index
In the early 1990s, Tajikistan remained primarily an agricultural
state. In 1990 agriculture contributed 38 percent of the country's net
material product (NMP--see Glossary). Despite development of an extensive
irrigation network in the Soviet era, water supply problems combined with
Tajikistan's mountainous topography to limit agriculture to 8 percent of
the republic's land in 1990. Some 800,000 hectares were under cultivation
in 1990, of which about 560,000 hectares were irrigated. The irrigated
land was used mostly to grow cotton; potatoes, vegetables, and grains also
were cultivated (see table 16, Appendix). In 1994 the republic produced
about 490,000 tons of vegetables and about 254,000 tons of cereals. The
dominance of cotton combined with the rapidly growing population to render
Tajikistan unable to meet domestic consumption requirements for some basic
foodstuffs, especially meat and dairy products, in the last years of the
Soviet era, even though the republic produced a surplus of fruits,
vegetables, and eggs. In the early 1990s, about 98 percent of agricultural
labor remained almost entirely unmechanized.
Through the mid-1990s, agricultural output continued to decline
precipitously as a consequence of the civil war and the awkward transition
to a post-Soviet economy. By 1995 overall production was estimated at
about half the 1990 level, and shortages continued in urban areas. Besides
the civil war, low prices for agricultural products and a shortage of
animal feed contributed to the decline. Hardly any privatization of
collective farms had occurred by the mid-1990s.
Cotton is by far the most important crop in Tajikistan's agrarian
economy. In parts of the republic, 85 percent of the land was planted to
cotton by the late 1980s, a figure that even republic officials described
as excessive. At the same time, the average cotton yield per hectare was
about half that achieved in the United States. Cotton production declined
in the early 1990s. In 1993 Tajikistan produced about 754,000 tons, a drop
of 30 percent from the 1991 figure.
Although cotton is fundamental to Tajikistan's economy, the republic's
rewards for cotton production in the Soviet system were disappointing.
About 90 percent of the harvest was shipped elsewhere for processing.
Tajikistani factories produced thread from some of the cotton harvest,
but, by the end of the Soviet era, more than 90 percent of the cotton
thread that was spun went elsewhere to be turned into finished goods. In
1990 the two southern provinces of Qurghonteppa and Kulob produced roughly
two-thirds of the republic's cotton, but they processed only 1 percent of
the crop locally.
Despite widespread concern about overemphasis on cotton cultivation,
the post-civil war government attempted to expand the production of the
country's most important cash crop. For example, in 1995 it mandated an
increase over the preceding year of 10,000 hectares in land assigned to
cotton. However, the cotton output remained far below both the government
quota and the production levels of the late Soviet era. Independent
Tajikistan continued to send most of its cotton crop elsewhere--mainly to
CIS countries--for processing.
Data as of March 1996
|
|