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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Uzbekistan
Index
Uzbekistan's climate is classified as continental, with hot summers and
cool winters. Summer temperatures often surpass 40°C; winter
temperatures average about -23°C, but may fall as low as -40°C.
Most of the country also is quite arid, with average annual rainfall
amounting to between 100 and 200 millimeters and occurring mostly in
winter and spring. Between July and September, little precipitation falls,
essentially stopping the growth of vegetation during that period.
Environmental Problems
Despite Uzbekistan's rich and varied natural environment, decades of
environmental neglect in the Soviet Union have combined with skewed
economic policies in the Soviet south to make Uzbekistan one of the
gravest of the CIS's many environmental crises. The heavy use of
agrochemicals, diversion of huge amounts of irrigation water from the two
rivers that feed the region, and the chronic lack of water treatment
plants are among the factors that have caused health and environmental
problems on an enormous scale.
Environmental devastation in Uzbekistan is best exemplified by the
catastrophe of the Aral Sea. Because of diversion of the Amu Darya and
Syrdariya for cotton cultivation and other purposes, what once was the
world's fourth largest inland sea has shrunk in the past thirty years to
only about one-third of its 1960 volume and less than half its 1960
geographical size. The desiccation and salinization of the lake have
caused extensive storms of salt and dust from the sea's dried bottom,
wreaking havoc on the region's agriculture and ecosystems and on the
population's health. Desertification has led to the large-scale loss of
plant and animal life, loss of arable land, changed climatic conditions,
depleted yields on the cultivated land that remains, and destruction of
historical and cultural monuments. Every year, many tons of salts
reportedly are carried as far as 800 kilometers away. Regional experts
assert that salt and dust storms from the Aral Sea have raised the level
of particulate matter in the earth's atmosphere by more than 5 percent,
seriously affecting global climate change.
The Aral Sea disaster is only the most visible indicator of
environmental decay, however. The Soviet approach to environmental
management brought decades of poor water management and lack of water or
sewage treatment facilities; inordinately heavy use of pesticides,
herbicides, defoliants, and fertilizers in the fields; and construction of
industrial enterprises without regard to human or environmental impact.
Those policies present enormous environmental challenges throughout
Uzbekistan.
Water Pollution
Large-scale use of chemicals for cotton cultivation, inefficient
irrigation systems, and poor drainage systems are examples of the
conditions that led to a high filtration of salinized and contaminated
water back into the soil. Post-Soviet policies have become even more
dangerous; in the early 1990s, the average application of chemical
fertilizers and insecticides throughout the Central Asian republics was
twenty to twenty-five kilograms per hectare, compared with the former
average of three kilograms per hectare for the entire Soviet Union. As a
result, the supply of fresh water has received further contaminants.
Industrial pollutants also have damaged Uzbekistan's water. In the Amu
Darya, concentrations of phenol and oil products have been measured at far
above acceptable health standards. In 1989 the minister of health of the
Turkmen SSR described the Amu Darya as a sewage ditch for industrial and
agricultural waste substances. Experts who monitored the river in 1995
reported even further deterioration.
In the early 1990s, about 60 percent of pollution control funding went
to water-related projects, but only about half of cities and about
one-quarter of villages have sewers. Communal water systems do not meet
health standards; much of the population lacks drinking water systems and
must drink water straight from contaminated irrigation ditches, canals, or
the Amu Darya itself.
According to one report, virtually all the large underground fresh-water
supplies in Uzbekistan are polluted by industrial and chemical wastes. An
official in Uzbekistan's Ministry of Environment estimated that about half
of the country's population lives in regions where the water is severely
polluted. The government estimated in 1995 that only 230 of the country's
8,000 industrial enterprises were following pollution control standards.
Air Pollution
Poor water management and heavy use of agricultural chemicals also have
polluted the air. Salt and dust storms and the spraying of pesticides and
defoliants for the cotton crop have led to severe degradation of air
quality in rural areas.
In urban areas, factories and auto emissions are a growing threat to air
quality. Fewer than half of factory smokestacks in Uzbekistan are equipped
with filtration devices, and none has the capacity to filter gaseous
emissions. In addition, a high percentage of existing filters are
defective or out of operation. Air pollution data for Tashkent, Farghona,
and Olmaliq show all three cities exceeding recommended levels of nitrous
dioxide and particulates. High levels of heavy metals such as lead,
nickel, zinc, copper, mercury, and manganese have been found in
Uzbekistan's atmosphere, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, waste
materials, and ferrous and nonferrous metallurgy. Especially high
concentrations of heavy metals have been reported in Toshkent Province and
in the southern part of Uzbekistan near the Olmaliq Metallurgy Combine. In
the mid-1990s, Uzbekistan's industrial production, about 60 percent of the
total for the Central Asian nations excluding Kazakstan, also yielded
about 60 percent of the total volume of Central Asia's emissions of
harmful substances into the atmosphere. Because automobiles are relatively
scarce, automotive exhaust is a problem only in Tashkent and Farghona.
Government Environmental Policy
The government of Uzbekistan has acknowledged the extent of the
country's environmental problems, and it has made an oral commitment to
address them. But the governmental structures to deal with these problems
remain confused and ill defined. Old agencies and organizations have been
expanded to address these questions, and new ones have been created,
resulting in a bureaucratic web of agencies with no generally understood
commitment to attack environmental problems directly. Various
nongovernmental and grassroots environmental organizations also have begun
to form, some closely tied to the current government and others assuming
an opposition stance. For example, environmental issues were prominent
points in the original platform of Birlik, the first major opposition
movement to emerge in Uzbekistan (see The 1980s, this ch.). By the
mid-1990s, such issues had become a key concern of all opposition groups
and a cause of growing concern among the population as a whole.
In the first half of the 1990s, many plans were proposed to limit or
discourage economic practices that damage the environment. Despite
discussion of programs to require payments for resources (especially
water) and to collect fines from heavy polluters, however, little has been
accomplished. The obstacles are a lack of law enforcement in these areas,
inconsistent government economic and environmental planning, corruption,
and the overwhelming concentration of power in the hands of a president
who shows little tolerance of grassroots activity (see Postindependence
Changes, this ch.).
International donors and Western assistance agencies have devised
programs to transfer technology and know-how to address these problems
(see International Financial Relations, this ch.). But the country's
environmental problems are predominantly the result of abuse and
mismanagement of natural resources promoted by political and economic
priorities. Until the political will emerges to regard environmental and
health problems as a threat not only to the government in power but also
to the very survival of Uzbekistan, the increasingly grave environmental
threat will not be addressed effectively.
Data as of March 1996
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