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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Tajikistan
Index
Industrial development in Tajikistan has proceeded slowly and
inefficiently, both in the Soviet era and afterward. The civil war and
ensuing political turmoil kept production levels low in the mid-1990s.
Historical Background
Tajikistan's industrial development began in earnest in the late 1930s.
The early emphasis was on processing cotton and manufacturing construction
materials. World War II was a major stimulus to industrial expansion. The
output of existing factories was increased to meet wartime demands, and
some factories were moved to the republic from the European part of the
Soviet Union to safeguard them from the advancing German army.
Skilled workers who relocated to Tajikistan from points west received
preferential treatment, including substantially higher wages than those
paid to Tajiks; this practice continued long after the war. Such migrants
provided the bulk of the labor force in many of the republic's industries
through the end of the Soviet era. Cotton textile mills and metallurgy,
machine construction, the aluminum smelting plant, and the chemical
industry all had disproportionately small percentages of Tajik workers, or
none at all.
The Vakhsh River valley in southern Tajikistan became a center of
extensive industrial development (see Topography and Drainage, this ch.).
The river was dammed at several points to provide water for agriculture
and cheap hydroelectric power, which stimulated construction of factories
in the area. Many of the plants in the valley process agricultural
products or provide agricultural materials such as fertilizer. A large
chemical plant also uses power from the Vakhsh.
Industry in the 1990s
In the early 1990s, the configuration of industry continued to reflect
the specialized roles assigned to Tajikistan within the Soviet system,
hindering advancement of enterprises that utilized the republic's natural
resources most effectively. The civil war also made industrial
reorganization problematic.
In 1991 industry and construction contributed 43.5 percent of the
country's NMP, of which industry's share was 30.6 percent--but those
sectors employed only 20.4 percent of the work force. Tajikistan's only
heavy manufacturing industries are aluminum and chemical production and a
very small machinery and metalworking industry. The most important light
industries are food processing and fabric and carpet weaving. After
declining an estimated 40 percent between 1990 and 1993, industrial
production dropped another 31 percent in 1994. Declines in the Dushanbe
and Khujand regions exceeded that figure. The output of only five
industrial products increased in 1994: high-voltage electrical equipment,
textile equipment, winding machines, processed cereals, and salt. The most
serious declines were in chemicals, engineering, metal processing,
building materials, light industry, and food processing. According to
government reports, production declines generally were greater in
privately owned industries than in state enterprises.
Tajikistan's overall industrial production capacity was underutilized
in the first half of the 1990s. The steadily rising cost of raw materials,
fuel, and energy combined with the obsolescence of production equipment
and the lack of qualified industrial workers to place Tajikistani
industrial products, which never had been of especially high quality, at a
great disadvantage in foreign markets.
Aluminum
Tajikistan's major industrial enterprise is the aluminum processing
plant at Regar in the western part of the republic. When the plant opened
in 1975, it included the world's largest aluminum smelter, with a capacity
of 500,000 tons per year. But difficulties arose in the early 1990s
because of the civil war and unreliable raw material supply. Aluminum
production and quality began to decline in 1992 because Azerbaijan and
Russia cut the supply of semiprocessed alumina upon which the plant
depended. By 1995 the plant's management was predicting a yearly output of
240,000 tons, still less than half the maximum capacity. The prolonged
decline was caused by outmoded equipment, low world prices for aluminum,
the emigration of much of the plant's skilled labor force, difficulties in
obtaining raw materials, and continued disruption resulting from the civil
war.
Mining
In the Soviet period, several minerals, including antimony, mercury,
molybdenum, and tungsten, were mined in Tajikistan; the Soviet system
assigned Tajikistan to supply specific raw or partially processed goods to
other parts of the Soviet Union. For example, nearly all of Tajikistan's
gold went to Uzbekistan for processing. However, in the 1990s the presence
in Tajikistan of a hitherto-secret uranium-mining and
preliminary-processing operation became public for the first time. The
operation, whose labor force included political prisoners and members of
nationalities deported by Stalin from certain autonomous republics of the
Russian Republic, may have accounted for almost one-third of total mining
in the Soviet Union. According to official Tajikistani reports, the mines
were exhausted by 1990.
Data as of March 1996
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