Turkmenistan to Tackle Farmland Problems

Turkmen president Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov has called for a comprehensive audit of the country’s usable land resources, the first of its kind in two decades. 

Speaking on national television in mid-September, Berdymuhammedov said current records of arable lands and the condition of the soil were out of date and unsatisfactory.

The most official data from Turkmenistan, submitted in a 2004 national report for the Central Asian Regional Environmental Action Plan, show that over 65 per cent of arable land suffers from high salinity. Some experts say that 80 per cent of land hs suffered degradation.

"A build-up of salt on the surface and in the subsoil is the major indicator of land degradation," an employee of Turkmenistan’s Academy of Sciences who did not want to be identified, adding that the large volumes of drainage waters discharged into semidesert pasturelands created salty marshes.

Turkmenistan has over 40 million hectares of agricultural land, of which 17 million can be irrigated. Over a third of the latter is used to grow cotton, a key source of export revenue.

An agricultural scientist said more than 30,000 hectares of land was being lost to soil degradation.

"It’s environmental collapse," the scientist said. "Soil degradation is forcing us to take over new land, which reduces wildlife areas."

Commentators say that more accurate land records and proper studies of soil quality could help revive agriculture. (See Turkmen Farmers Struggle With Polluted Land)

A former agriculture ministry official recalled that the Soviet authorities kept land records and soil analysis to maintain the collective farm system. At that time, specialist advice would be issued to farmers so that they knew what crops to grow on which land.

"Over the last two decades, the state of the soil has worsened because there wasn’t anyone looking after these matters, and [after 1991] the agrochemical laboratories were closed almost immediately," specialist said. "It was only natural that this state of affairs was going to make itself felt sooner or later."

This article was produced as part of IWPR's News Briefing Central Asia output, funded by the National Endowment for Democracy.