World

A ‘dying Aral Sea | fg
forces overhaul of we
environment policy §

eep in the arid step-
pes of Soviet Cen-
tral Asia an unfold-
ing ecological night-
mare, more than 30
years in the making,
is finally, belatedly,

_ being confronted.
After an in-depth study by an extraordinary
commission, the Soviet government announ-
ced at the end of September a package of
urgent measures to slow the catastrophic
Shrinkage of the Aral Sea and to begin a
total overhaul of agricultural and other
water uses in the entire region.

The scope of the disaster around the Aral
Sea, once the world’s fourth largest lake, is
Only now becoming generally known. Due
Primarily to a damn-the-consequences drive
to expand cotton and rice production on
Marginal Uzbek and Turkmenian steppe-
lands Over the past three decades, water

OWing into the Aral Sea from its two rivers,
the Amu Darya (Oxus) and Syr Darya, has
fallen from around 720 cubic kilometres per
year in the past to virtually zero in 1986.

_ the price of the vast quantities ot water
diverted to irrigation purposes is staggering.

€ Aral Sea has lost 60 per cent of its
Volume in just 28 years. Its area has shrunk
by almost half, to barely 25,000 square
Kilometres, while it has slipped to sixth place
among the world’s lakes. The water level
has dropped by 13 metres, and the sea shore
as receded in places up to 100 kilometres,
leaving towns and entire fleets of fishing

boats stranded, surrealistically, among sand
Unes.
_ Flying over the Aral Sea, the stages of its
\sappearance are clearly visible, like the
Itty rings on a bathtub. Down below, as
the Soviet press is now describing in excru-
Clating detail, the catastrophe threatens to
destroy the livlihood of at least the three

Million people inhabiting the Aral basin,

and to have an as yet unknown impact upon
Weather patterns across Asia.

‘here the sea used to be “there is a
“ontinuous dry, hot wind raising huge
quantities of salt-tinged dust,” writes Yuri

Yushin in a recent issue of the illustrated
et) Ogonyok. “One searches the former
ali ed in the vain hope of finding anything
a But the tragic silence is absolutely
fee the outcome of human ‘omnipo-

Nce’. The Aral Sea existed for 35,000,000
years, and we have practically destroyed it

M less than 30 ....”

1959 € Aral Sea was, as Tecently as the
US S, one of the major fishing centres of the
SR, providing more than 10 per cent of

a © country’s annual catch. Today the fish
nd the industry are both gone, victims of
ae Aral Sea’s rising salinity. Instead, over
shee Once covered with blue waters and
Oals of fish, huge salt-laced dust storms
©W rise 10 or 12 times a year to strike
te .— as if in biblical vengeance —
erent those very irrigated croplands that
ee them. Some 70 million tons of this
Tae salt-sand mixture goes swirling
i the air every year from the former sea
th Or, and winds dump an average of more
4n half a ton of it on every single hectare

of farmland in the region — forcing even
more water to be diverted to flush the salt
out.

The deteriorating situation poses a par-
ticularly acute dilemma for the Soviet
Union, which became virtually self-suffi-
cient in rice and cotton in the 1960s and
1970s thanks to the damming of the Amu
Darya and Syr Darya, and the utilization of
their waters for large-scale irrigation pro-
jects. Cultivated lands in Central Asia
expanded dramatically as a result, from 2.9-
million hectares in 1950 to 7.2-million at
present. The figures indicate the country’s
stake in this: the region produces 95 per cent
of the USSR’s cotton, 40 per cent of its rice,
and 35 per cent of its fruit.

The roots of the disaster are complex.

They lie in the single-minded drive to pro-
duce more and more cotton and rice —
both extremely thirsty crops — on land
that was not well-suited to them in the first
place. The situation was compounded by
corruption, mismanagement and indiffer-
ence to consequences, all factors that are
coming under the blinding light of public
scrutiny in the Soviet Union these days.

Water, which was viewed -as costing
nothing, was massively over-used. In addi-
tion to over-irrigating, Central Asian
farmers doused their fields with up to 20
times the normal limit of mineral fertilizers
and 50 times the allowable amounts of pes-
ticides and herbicides in their efforts to
come in over the planned quotas of produc-
tion. After use, irrigation water was often
carelessly sloughed off.

The savagely ironic result: marshes and
artificial lakes pock-mark the desert. One
such inadvertent creation, the salty lake
Sarakamyush in the desert of northern
Turkmenia, occupies an area larger than
metropolitan Toronto. According to one
estimate, the amount of water uselessly mix-
ing with sand is about equal to the entire
shortfall of the Aral Sea.

The country is now beginning to awake
to several interlocking and simultaneous
catastrophes:

@ An ecological one, in which the dying
Aral Sea will destabilize the ecology of the
entire region and trigger climatic conse-
quences as far away as India. Writes Yuri
Lyushin: “Instead of the Aral Sea we'll have
a new desert — the “Aral Kum” — which
will join with the Kara Hkum and the Kyzyl
Kum to form a super-desert that will begin
to rival the Sahara. ...”

@ An economic one, which has already
seen the quality of Central Asian cotton and
rice plummet even as production costs sky-
rocket. The total price of monoculture, cor-
ruption and mismanagement in Central
Asia over the past three decades has yet to
be calculated, but no one doubts that it will
be staggering.

e A human one. Perhaps the most
shocking aspect of this story, as it assumes
its full dimensions in the Soviet press, con-
cerns the dislocation and devastation of
people’s lives and health in the course of this
disaster. As a result of the high concentra-
tion of chemical poisons turning up in the
lower reaches of the Amu Darya and Syr
Darya, as well as the numerous polluted
and stagnant waters that dot the desert and
seep into the water table, illnesses among
the inhabitants of the Aral basin have
soared. se

The incidence of kidney and liver disease —

particularly hepatitis — in the Aral region
is several times the national average. Most
horrifying of all, infant mortality in some
regions around the Aral Sea has reached 10

per cent, a figure that recalls the Czarist

>

HYDROELECTRIC-IRRIGATION DAM IN TAJIKSTAN ... damming the rivers
feeding the Aral Sea has had disastrous ecological consequences.

epoch, or the most backward and under-
developed countries in today’s world.

If the sea’s decline continues, huge
numbers of people may ultimately have to
be evacuated from the Aral region. This is
particularly true of the Karakalpak people,
who have historically lived near the Sea and
drawn their sustenance from it.

What is to be done? The CPSU Central
Committee and the Soviet government have
recently adopted measures which may at
least arrest the fall of the Aral Sea’s level,
and lead to a far more rational and respon-
sible use of the region’s water resources.

Last autumn, the river dams were opened

Henceforth water will be metered, and col-
lective farms and industries will have to pay
for what they use. Perhaps this will foster a
new attitude toward the conservation of
precious resources.

There is also talk of switching to less
water-intensive crops. Much of the Aral
region traditionally supported livestock-
breeding, and agronomists say that with
modern means of production it could do so
quite successfully again.

During the Brezhnev era, grandiose
designs were drawn up to solve Central
Asia’s water crisis by diverting two northern
Siberian rivers, the Ob and the Irtish, and

ER Re AS a a i ns i cert

The price of diverting vast quantities of water to
irrigation is staggering ... water flowing into the Aral
Sea has fallen from 720 cubic kilometres per year to

virtually zero.

and water — albeit not nearly enough —

has begun flowing into the Sea again. This
year fish are even being caught once again in
the river deltas, a small miracle that testifies
to the resilience of nature.

The radical measures adopted by the
Soviet government will guarantee an inflow
of 20-21 cubic kilometers annually by the
year 2005, which may be enough to stop the
shrinkage. Much greater savings are hoped
for through reconstruction of irrigation sys-
tems, construction of collection and recy-
cling facilities, and the introduction of strict
water conservation methods.

The new economic system of hozraschot,
or cost-accounting, will also play a role.

channelling them southward. That idea was
shelved two years ago as too expensive and
too ecologically uncertain. It is still officially
dead, though it seems that some scaled-
down and more rational version of it may
yet resurface. In the final analysis, there may
be no other way to actually restore the Aral
Sea and also provide a decent livlihood for
Soviet Central Asia’s exploding population.

As Gorbachev has noted frequently, the
burden of past mistakes weighs very heavily
upon the present generation. Nowhere is
this more apparent than in the tragedy of
the Aral Sea, and nowhere are the creative
and decisive new approaches of perestroika
more desperately needed.

Pacific Tribune, November 7, 1988 « 9

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