Source: Financial Times  

By Isabel Gorst

May 21 2008 - Husein remembers how as a boy he would walk from his home in Aralsk in south Kazakhstan to fish in the Aral Sea. Now the sea is over 40km away and Aralsk port, once home to a thriving fishing industry and a hub for central Asia’s cotton and oil trade, is a wasteland where camels wander among the rusted hulls of fishing boats.

“At first everyone wondered where the sea had gone to,” says Husein, now a pensioner. “Perhaps it had gone underground or perhaps it had simply disappeared.”

This month, a new fish factory shaped like a phoenix will open, signalling the revival of Aralsk.

The shrinking of the Aral Sea began after the Soviet Union launched a grandiose scheme to cultivate the barren central Asian steppe in the 1960s. Mighty rivers in the mountains of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan were tapped to irrigate cotton and rice plantations downstream, choking supplies to the sea.

After the Soviet Union dissolved, international donors came to the rescue. A project funded by the World Bank to contain water behind a dam near the mouth of the Syr Darya river has helped replenish the northern section of the sea and reduce the salinity that earlier drove fish away.

But the Aral Sea will never be fully restored. “There is so much irrigation happening upstream that there is just not enough water,” says Joop Stoutjesdijk, the leader of the World Bank project.

While Soviet planners could be blamed for the demise of the Aral Sea, it is the collapse of an old system of water management oriented towards agriculture that accounts for many of central Asia’s water problems today.

International efforts to broker a water co-operation scheme across the region in the 1990s have since been abandoned. Kazakhstan, at the end of the chain of countries crossed by the Syr Darya, is the only central Asian state to have signed the international law on trans-boundary rivers so far.

“If Europeans agreed about the Dniestr and southeast Asians about the Mekong, why cannot central Asian countries agree about how to share their rivers?” says Serikbai Smailov at the Kazakh ministry of agriculture’s water resources committee. “Every year there are high-level meetings [about water] – ministers agree and congratulate each other, then go home and continue to go their own way.”

A more realistic approach may be to begin with national projects, like that in the northern Aral Sea, which will eventually piece together.

Idrissov Kuttykozha, deputy governor of the Kyzylorda region in south Kazakhstan, believes the larger, southern part of the sea bordering Uzbekistan and fed by the Amu Darya river is doomed. “Soon there will be nothing there. It will be a desert,” he says. [...]

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