Fate of the Aral Sea
Vladimir Sokolov, Staff Correspondent for Uzbekistan. Fate of the Aral Sea. November 18, 1987
The Literaturnaia gazeta surveys the wreckage of the Aral Sea catastrophe firsthand, five years after hosting the debate, tallying broken promises against grim realities: poisoned land, shrunken harvests, saltier breast milk. His prescription is radical — transform Central Asia from a cotton plantation into an industrial workshop, and let the rivers breathe again.
Original Source: Literaturnaia gazeta, Nov. 18, 1987, p. 12.
In the past few years, prestigious people wanting to see for themselves the spectacle of an ecological catastrophe have become constant visitors to the Aral Sea.
The gray-haired secretary of the district Party commit tee led [us] writers along the former sea floor to a former harbor, where on the sand, side by side like beached whales, lay the rusting mummies of a fishing fleet. A strong, steady wind blew from the north, bringing a salty taste to our lips—far off in that direction, every sunny day the mass of strong salt solution, lifeless, but still called the Aral Sea, continued to shrink and recede. In a matter of fact way (how many times had he done this before?), the secretary talked about the productive past of these fishing ships, about the crews that had all departed and the engines that had been removed, about the poverty that had come to the families of those fishermen who had nowhere to go or did not want to leave, and about the fact that the salt content in the breast milk of women in Muinak is now several times higher than the norm. ...
In September 1962, the All-Union Design, Surveying and Research Institute prophesied: ] "The bringing of new areas of the Aral Basin into agricultural cultivation will not stop in the future. The total area under cultivation will double. Over 70 cubic kilometers of water will be spread over the fields, instead of the current 40 cu. km. The increase in irrigated land promises not only to double the cotton and rice harvests but also to quadruple the production of meat and increase the harvests of vegetables, fruits and grapes." It is now the second half of the 1980s, time to tally the results. The total area of land under irrigation in the Aral Basin has not doubled, it has increased by 50%, and the hypothetical harvests of cotton and rice have not doubled either. As far as food is concerned, the very rich land of Central Asia is now producing the following amounts per capita: meat is 26% below the medical norm, milk is 42% below, and fruit and grapes are 53% below. What has in creased? The use of chemicals. There are not many other places in the country where such high dosages of mineral fertilizer are applied, and the amount of pesticides used on the cotton fields is dozens of times (!) greater than the average for either the Soviet Union or the US. What else has grown? The consumption of water for irrigation. Not the 70 cu. km. of water needed for the doubled land area but a whole 90 cu. km. is now applied "to the fields"! Isn't that absurd? If the problem were only the promises made by the institute—well, the country heard quite a few promises during the 1960s! But the development strategy for an entire region was built on these promises. This mistaken strategy has now resulted in some serious troubles, and it is simply in humane and incompatible with the principles of socialism to day for those in the upper echelons of the planned management of the economy to continue to take no notice of them, to continue to regard Central Asia as a subtropical paradise where rich Uzbeks (Tajiks, Turkmenians, Kirghiz) eat pilaf and melons and get rich on "white gold."
Today we must admit that, despite all the undoubted achievements (mainly of a quantitative nature), the billions of rubles in capital investments put primarily into increasing cotton production have not brought this land prosperity. In stead, that money aggravated the land's problems in the extreme. The fertility of irrigated plowland was undermined by decades of sowing cotton followed by cotton, and the total area of that land has been decreasing recently, de spite the putting into cultivation of more and more new land. ...
Even the climate has worsened appreciably, because the stands of timber that used to occupy up to 15% of the irri gated land have nearly disappeared, and now hot dry winds and dust storms race across Central Asia. The Kyzyl-Kum and Kara-Kum Deserts have come together on the bare bottom of the Aral Sea, salty sand covers the once fertile Amu Darya delta, and man has already lost more than 1 million hectares. The winds, which used to bring rain from the glassy sea, now come with trains of millions of tons of salt, poisoning the land and the air ever farther to the south, in the oases of KaraKalpakia, Khorezm and eastern Turkmenia. …
In order to maintain the sea's level merely at its present mark, the rivers must bring to it at least 45 cu. km. of water a year—two-fifths of the basin's entire water re sources. It doesn't seem like all that much, does it? But even this figure seems unrealizable if one knows that the Syr Darya stopped emptying into the Aral Sea a long time ago, while the once turbulent Amu Darya now barely carries the "sanitary minimum" to the sea—3 to 4 cu. km. per year. In dry years—and they have followed one after another over who knows how many five-year plans—virtually the entire flow of the basin, about 90 cu. km., is used for irrigation. It seems that it's all over, that the Aral Sea is doomed. ...
We must not forget that cotton growing in our country, in an area farther north than any other cotton zone in the world, necessarily involves sizable outlays and risk. Countries that lie closer to the equator and that do not experience our eternal thirst can grow cotton with nothing like the costs we incur. Isn't it time to take a new look at the thesis of independence in cotton? ...
Not only the country's Cotton Plantation but its Work shop—that is a fitting future for Uzbekistan. If one considers that industry and municipal services combined consume only one-tenth as much water as irrigated farming does, then a Workshop orientation alone can save the Aral Sea, as well as the entire natural environment of this wonderful part of the planet. Only a Workshop orientation can raise the standard of living and the levels of education and vocational training for millions of people who are now residents of villages. ...
Source: Black. USSR Documents. The Gorbachev Reforms, 1987, 354-356.