Shrinking of Aral Sea Leaves Central Asians Suffering
Ecology: Soviets' diversion of water for irrigation has
bequeathed a host of economic and health problems.
By RICHARD BOUDREAUX, Times Staff Writer
MUINAK, Uzbekistan--The old man roams what used to
be the floor of the Aral Sea, coaxing a ram, a goat and a
cow in search of food in what is now relentless desert.
Not far away is the rusting hull of the fishing boat
that three decades ago he sailed high above, on the
surface of bountiful waters. The marooned wreck stands
askew amid a ghostly fleet anchored in salty dunes.
Stopping his tiny herd in a patch of desert grass, he
encounters a stranger who inquires about the sea.
"I can no longer imagine any sea out there," replies
Sanginkik Saktaganov, turning his lean, weathered face
north toward the horizon where the shore disappeared. "I
don't think it will ever come back."
It is a pitiful epitaph for Central Asia's dying fountain
of life, uttered from a harsh and poisoned landscape that
is the region's costliest legacy of Soviet rule. The
presidents of the five countries dependent on the sea
have joined to lobby for worldwide help, but they have
received only modest commitments and even less relief.
"You cannot fill the Aral Sea with tears," says an Uzbek
poem.
Until 1960, the Aral was the world's fourth-largest
lake and produced 160 tons of fish a day, much of it
hauled in boats like Saktaganov's to a huge cannery in
this onetime coastal city.
Then, in one of humankind's cruelest assaults on
nature, Soviet engineers began diverting the two Aral
tributaries into the desert to irrigate the world's largest
cotton belt.
Today the sea has shriveled to a third of its former
volume and split into near-lifeless lagoons, its nearest
shore 30 miles from here. The Aral watershed, which
sustains most of Central Asia's 54 million people, is
poisoned.
Chemical pesticides and fertilizers wash from irrigated
cotton fields into the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers,
polluting much of the region's drinking water, its soil and
the sea. Toxic salts and dust blown off the exposed sea
bottom by blinding windstorms turn everything
grayish-brown.
Millions of people are sickened by the air and water, and
impoverished by the loss of fish and fertile land. The drying
of the Aral, whose water volume moderated the weather,
has brought Sahara-like extremes of hot and cold to the
valleys nearby, cutting the growing season by two months.
* * *
Worst of all, the Soviet Union, which created this
mess, is not around to clean it up. The five Central Asian
republics that emerged from the Soviet collapse in late
1991 lack the resources to cope.
Their most ambitious plans for the Aral watershed
stop short of reviving the sea or even halting its
shrinkage.
The Caspian Sea, 370 miles west of here, is rising. But
building a canal and pumping the spillover to the Aral
would cost $280 billion, and officials say that's utopian.
Reversing one of Russia's northward-flowing Siberian
rivers toward the Aral--an old Soviet idea--is rejected as
ecocidal.
Some environmentalists insist that drastic cutbacks
in cotton growing could save enough water to bring back
the sea.
But weak economies and growing populations put
national leaders under pressure to use any leftover water
to grow more food. Before they can even think about the
sea, officials say, the region must cope with the public
health and economic calamities that have come in the
wake of the Aral's depletion.
"All the parties recognize that restoring the sea to its
1960 level or anything approaching that is just not
feasible," said Peter Whitford, manager of the World
Bank's Aral basin aid project. "But a lot more can be done
to meet the human needs in the disaster zone and to put
land and water management on a more rational footing."
Reacting to a March 1993 appeal by Kazakhstan,
Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, the
World Bank helped these countries draft 19 such
projects--expected to cost $450 million over several
years--and organized a June 1994 donors conference in
Paris.
The results were disappointing. Donor nations pledged
$31 million of the $40 million asked for a one-year
start-up phase and delivered just $15.7 million--mostly
for studies by Western consultants.
"So many round tables, seminars and conferences, so
many reports published on problems we've known about
for years!" exclaimed geologist Gaip Khudainsasar,
pointing to piles of volumes in his cluttered office in
Turkmenistan. "Yet the Aral keeps shrinking, and the
ecology of the basin has not improved."
While environmentalists echo his frustration, some
small improvements are underway.
On the desolate shore of a small lake near Muinak, four
bulldozers kick up clouds of dust as they flatten the
sandy ground for seedlings. Workmen are laying irrigation
pipes to the new forest from the nearby Amu Darya.
Bekullah Davletiyarov, a 41-year-old hydraulic engineer,
wore an immaculate white suit to inspect his
U.N.-financed project, the first of a series of "green belts"
that will shield the Amu Darya delta from poisonous Aral
dust.
The U.S. Agency for International Development has
brought safer drinking water to about 500,000 people by
cleaning up 29 wells in Kazakhstan and building or
upgrading seven water treatment plants in Turkmenistan
and Uzbekistan.
But little help has come to this dried-up fishing port,
despite a plaintive billboard at one entrance. In English it
reads: "The catastrophe of the Aral Sea . . . is a disaster
on a global scale, which Uzbekistan and its neighbors
cannot cope with alone."
Few places have been hit as hard as Muinak.
* * *
The cannery, still its chief employer, takes a reduced
catch from nearby reservoirs and fish farms. But
impatient creditors have cut off tin supplies, idling the
cannery's 860 employees without pay for most of this
year.
People loitering on dusty streets talk of illness,
hunger, desperation.
A middle-aged woman pounced from a bread line not
long ago, witnesses recall, and stole a loaf from a
teen-age girl. The girl's mother chased the thief home,
where she was found dividing the bread among five frail
children--and mercifully left alone.
Dr. Abdurashid Ubiyev, deputy chief of the Muinak
hospital, said the town gets 70% of its medicine from
American and European donors but not enough to cope
with soaring disease rates.
Last year, for example, 23 of the town's 24,000 people
had tuberculosis, the doctor reported; now 78 do, and no
one outside Muinak helps treat them. Another 74 have
cancer, he said--half again as many as in 1993. Other
specialists say 87% of all children here are born anemic
and that infant mortality is 110 per 1,000--a rate
comparable to Uganda's.
"Tell me one thing," said Dr. Oral Ataniazova, director of
the institute on women's and children's medicine in Nukus,
the nearest city. "If there is a sincere will to solve the Aral
Sea problem, why after five years isn't there clean water in
every town in the delta?"
Uzbek President Islam Karimov, accused in Muinak of
ignoring the town, has led the criticism of foreign donors
for not giving more.
But the World Bank is delaying a new appeal for
donations until the Central Asians show more will to
confront the problem. They have not kept two pledges--to
give real power to a five-nation body to push Aral basin
projects, and to set aside 1% of each nation's income to
pay for them.
Saving precious water in the basin will depend on other
hard decisions.
Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, whose leaders resist
free-market reform, have yet to set prices for water
use--a step to control waste.
Nor have Central Asian leaders as a group begun to
compromise over sharing rivers that flow through all five
countries. A Soviet-era plan of water allocation remains in
effect as they try, with multinational advice, to write a
new one; in practice, each hoards what water it can and
mistrusts its neighbors.
Meanwhile, the Aral continues to lose more water to
evaporation than it gains from rainfall and its beleaguered
tributaries. Scientists expect it to stabilize at about half
its current size.
In Muinak today, the shore is visible only from the
town's Aral Sea Museum--through a surreal window on
the past.
Carp, pike and other fish that once thrived in the Aral
line a museum shelf, head down in glass jars. Old fishing
nets hang from the walls. Stuffed carcasses of animals
that roamed the wooded shore--foxes, wolves, jackals and
badgers--hold rigid poses. There's a kayak, plus some
wooden models of ferries, trawlers and barges.
Among the paintings is one of a woman in a head scarf
and a girl with pigtails standing by a fishing boat on the
Aral shore.
They are looking at the sea.
* * *
The Shrinking Sea
How the Aral Sea has shrunk since 1960 and what it
might look like in the year 2000.
Copyright Los Angeles Times