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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Tajikistan
Index
Most of Tajikistan's environmental problems are related to the
agricultural policies imposed on the country during the Soviet period. By
1991 heavy use of mineral fertilizers and agricultural chemicals was a
major cause of pollution in the republic. Among those chemicals were DDT,
banned by international convention, and several defoliants and herbicides.
In addition to the damage they have done to the air, land, and water, the
chemicals have contaminated the cottonseeds whose oil is used widely for
cooking. Cotton farmers and their families are at particular risk from the
overuse of agricultural chemicals, both from direct physical contact in
the field and from the use of the branches of cotton plants at home for
fuel. All of these toxic sources are believed to contribute to a high
incidence of maternal and child mortality and birth defects. In 1994 the
infant mortality rate was 43.2 per 1,000 births, the second highest rate
among former Soviet republics. The rate in 1990 had been 40.0 infant
deaths per 1,000 births (see table 5, Appendix; Health Conditions, this
ch.).
Cotton requires particularly intense irrigation (see Agriculture, this
ch.). In Tajikistan's cotton-growing regions, farms were established in
large, semiarid tracts and in tracts reclaimed from the desert, but
cotton's growing season is summer, when the region receives virtually no
rainfall. The 50 percent increase in cotton cultivation mandated by Soviet
and post-Soviet agricultural planners between 1964 and 1994 consequently
overtaxed the regional water supply. Poorly designed irrigation networks
led to massive runoff, which increased soil salinity and carried toxic
agricultural chemicals downstream to other fields, the Aral Sea, and
populated areas of the region.
By the 1980s, nearly 90 percent of water use in Central Asia was for
agriculture. Of that quantity, nearly 75 percent came from the Amu Darya
and the Syrdariya, the chief tributaries of the Aral Sea on the
Kazakstan-Uzbekistan border to the northwest of Tajikistan. As the
desiccation of the Aral Sea came to international attention in the 1980s,
water-use policy became a contentious issue between Soviet republics such
as Tajikistan, where the main rivers rise, and those farther downstream,
including Uzbekistan. By the end of the Soviet era, the central government
had relinquished central control of water-use policy for Central Asia, but
the republics had not agreed on an allocation policy.
Industry also causes pollution problems. A major offender is the
production of nonferrous metals. One of Tajikistan's leading industrial
sites, the aluminum plant at Regar (also known as Tursunzoda), west of
Dushanbe near the border with Uzbekistan, generates large amounts of toxic
waste gases that have been blamed for a sharp increase in the number of
birth defects among people who live within range of its emissions.
In 1992 the Supreme Soviet of Tajikistan established a Ministry of
Environmental Protection. However, the enforcement activity of the
ministry was limited severely by the political upheavals that plagued
Tajikistan in its first years of independence (see Transition to
Post-Soviet Government, this ch.). The only registered private
environmental group in Tajikistan in the early 1990s was a chapter of the
Social-Ecological Alliance, the largest informal environmental association
in the former Soviet Union. The Tajikistani branch's main functions have
been to conduct environmental research and to organize protests against
the Roghun Hydroelectric Plant project (see Energy, this ch.).
Data as of March 1996
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