ARAL SEA SHRINKAGE: THE MOST ACUTE ECOLOGICAL PROBLEM OF THE CENTRAL ASIAN REGION

Dr. Saifullah Joyo*

& Dr. Shah Jehan**

The Russians have left behind many devastating environmental problems that are source of many discontents in the Central Asian Region. These tend to aggravate the regions social conditions as well.
A major environmental problem with very serious political implications involves the “tyranny” of cotton mono cropping inflicted on Uzbekistan, which until 1990 accounted to 75% of the total agriculture.1 Rafik Nishanov, a Deputy from ex-UzSSR decried the “monstrous” cotton monoculture of the region as having brought “Uzbekistan not only to an economic standstill, but produced mass ecological decay and mass illness”.2 Moscow’s obsession with expending cotton production has caused an enormous amount of environmental deterioration accompanied by soil salinization, land erosion, loss of surface and ground waters, pollution of the Aral Sea and environment with pesticides, defoliants, and fertilizers.
In Uzbekistan, public discontent has focused on a Kremlin imposed policy that called for massive use of defoliants on cotton crops. It is blamed that the regions staggering 25% infant mortality rates is only due to the massive use of these defoliants. By the early 1980’s, the level of input of non-organic mineral fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides together per hectare in Uzbekistan was almost 30 times the national average.3 They contaminated soils, rivers, lakes, subsoil water and clean water deposits.
In 1990’s, about 44% of irrigated land was strongly salinated in Uzbekistan.4 The cumulative result has also been a dramatic rise in death and disease. Frequently cited in the press are increasing occurrences of typhoid, para-typhoid and hepatitis due to contaminated drinking water, rising rates of intestinal disease and cancers; and increased frequency of anemia, cholera, dysentery and a host of other illnesses. The average life expectancy in some villages in the Aral Sea region is roughly 38 years.
In 1961, when Gray Powers of USA flew over the Aral Sea in his U2 Spy plane, revealed that on the Island of Vozrozhdeniya (on the Aral Sea), there is top-secret bacteriological test site.5 This thing was also mentioned for the first time in 1992 in open-source official documents that for the five decades now bacteriological weapons have been tested there, with terrible consequences for all the living things, thus imposing a serious impact on the environment.6 In Uzbekistan, rivers, canals, water reservoirs, and even underground waters are submitted to various man-made effects. Now days, all water resources of the Aral Sea Basin are consumed in full in the national economy. The disappearance of the Aral Sea has become the most acute ecological problem and a national disaster because, “the Aral crisis”, according to Islam Karimov, “is the biggest ecological and humane catastrophes in the recorded history, that affects approximately 35 million people who live in the Sea Basin.7
The water level of the Aral Sea, once the world’s fourth largest internal body of water, roughly equal to the size of Sindh, was dropped to 16 meters till 1995.8 Its volume was decreased by 50% or 30,000 sq.km in 1990, and salinity reached to 44% since 1961.9 (also see Table: Changing Profile of Aral Sea). In the late 1980’s the sea was divided into the “Little Aral” in the north and the “Big Aral” to the south.10 The major cause of this ecological disaster is the substantial reduction of inflow from the Syr Darya and Amu Darya, the only tributaries to this water body. Prior to the 1960’s, discharge to the Aral Sea averaged around 55 km, for 1978-81 it had fallen to 9-10 km, and in the dry years of 1982, essentially no water reached the sea.11 The Aral has shrunk so much that “Aralsk” — which was a main seaport in 1960 has become 60 miles away from the shore in 1990.12 It is predicted that the sea will disappear completely by the year 2010.13 The Kara-Kum Canal is also reducing inflow of the Aral in recent decades. This canal was the largest and longest irrigation canal in the ex-USSR, which stretches 1300 kms westwards through the Turkmenistan along the southern margins of the Kara-Kum Desert from where the Amu Darya emerges from the mountains.14 Already, the sea’s shrinkage has led to the ecological degradation of the deltas of two tributary rivers, the blowing of heavily salt-laden dust from the dried sea bottom for distances up to 450 km and its setting on agricultural lands and climatic changes as well as drop in ground water levels over a sizeable areas adjacent to the sea. These changes have severely negative impacts and the most important ones are briefly discussed below:

1. The Amu Darya and the Syr Darya deltas are increasingly devastated. There has been the diminution of vegetative cover. The formerly rich deltaic fauna, including some endangered species of waterfowl has been severely depressed. For example, the number of major nesting bird species in the Syr Darya delta has swindled from 173 to 38.
2. The Aral Sea contained an estimated 10 billion metric tons of dissolved salts in 1960. As the sea has shrunk therefore, an enormous quantity of salts have deposited on the former bottom, which attained an area of nearly 28,000 sq. kms by 1989.15 Consequently, the airborne transport of salt, sand, and toxic dust has become a severe problem. Traces of Aral’s sand and salt have been found as far away as Georgia and the Russian coast of the Arctic Sea.16 The salts deposited as aerosols by the rain and dew is toxic to plants and harmful to animals that ingest them when grazing. The essence of the problem is well stated by Stefan Klotzli that; “The Aral has altered its role from being a receiver of salt to a major supplier of salt in the region”.17
3. Thousands of tones of salt and dust are carried by winds to the snow-capped peaks of the Pamirs and the Hindukush Mountains where they cause the snow to melt at an accelerated pace which causes floods and mud slides.18

Table: Changing Profile of the Aral Sea

Source: Philip Micklin, The Water Management Crisis in Central Asia, (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh, Centre for Russian Studies, 1992), p.67.

1. Since 1983, the Aral has stopped to be a fishery zone, where now only four of the original 24 fish species remain. At the site, rusted frames of the once powerful fishing fleet may be seen now far away from the present-day shoreline. Bays of Bozkol, Altynkol, Karatma and Akpetkin archipelago have disappeared. Major fish canneries at the ports of Aralsk and Muynak have stopped their work and their 60,000 fishermen are now unemployed.

5.     Climate around the Aral has become more continental and dryer, with warmer summers, cooler winters, and lowered humidity, particularly with 50 to 60 km’s of the former shoreline. There are extreme seasonal variation from a January low of — 40oC to a July high of +40oC.
6.     Aral shrinkage has shortened the growing season on the northern margins of cotton rising in the Karakalpak Region, sufficiently to force a switch to rice cultivation.
7.     Drinking water contamination in the area is believed to be the main cause of high rates of intestinal illnesses, hepatitis, kidney failure, gall stones, liver ailments, pulmonary diseases, thyroid gland ailments, esophageal cancer, genetic defects, typhoid, cholera and very high level of infant mortality. There are reports that 1.4 million people are suffering from serious health problems, living in the Karakal-pakstan.
8.     Desert animals drinking from the Aral Sea are also dying because of its greatly increased mineralisation, including the endangered “Kulan” (Asiatic wild ass) and “Saiga” (Steppe antelope) that live on the Bassakel’mes Island.
9.     It is estimated that damage to the region’s resources from the sea’s decline could reach 4-5billion roubles in the near future.

The above-mentioned situation of Aral needs a full, prompt, and practical action. According to Tulepbergen Kaipbergenov; “the Aral needs water, not tears”.19 The most feasible solution for this problem was the Siberian River Diversion Project (“SIBRAL”). The project involved diverting water from Ob and Irtysh River and channeling it 1500 miles south to refill the Aral Sea, all at a start-up cost of some $40 billion.20 The project was dropped due to changing priorities in 1986 but, it took three spasms before the project would die i.e.; “Brezhnev loved the idea, Andropov hated it, Chernenko loved it, and Gorbachev finally buried it”.21
Dr. Robert Kurmantayev, Head of the Kazakh Institute of Hydrology claims to have discovered a direct link between the drying up of the Aral Sea and the increased water levels in the Caspian Sea. He has revealed an interesting interdependence between the Aral and Caspian Seas, which are 450-500 km’s apart. According to him; “when the Aral Sea began to dry up, the water level in the Caspian Sea began to raise considerably”.22 Thus a new plan worked out by Dr. Kurmantayev involves the construction of a 450 km long Caspian-Aral Canal to divert the Caspian’s surplus water to the Aral.
In Uzbekistan there has also been the elaboration of state programme on environmental protection and radical use of natural resources in the long run up to 2005. Besides this, all enterprises in the Republic are now liable to a 1% environmental tax.23
The meeting of the Heads of States of Central Asia held in March 1993, in Kyzul­-Orda City, where an agreement on joint actions to solve the Aral Sea crisis was signed. Leaders of all five Central Asian Republics agreed to setup Interstate Council on Aral Sea Issues, its Executive Committee as well as the International Fund to Save the Aral Sea were setup. They agreed to pay 1% of their 1994 budgets to the Aral Fund.24 At the Second Meeting of the Heads of Central Asian States, held at Nukus in January 1994, a programme of specific actions to improve environmental situation in the Aral Sea Basin for the following three to five years considering social and political development of the region was approved.25At the Third Meeting of the Heads of Central Asian States, held at Dashkhovuz (Turkmenistan) in March 1995, the Interstate Council reported on implementation of this programme. In February 1997, in the city of Almaty (Kazakhstan) at the Meeting of the Heads of Five Central Asian States with the participation of the representatives of United Nations, World Bank, and other international organizations, a decision was taken there to improve the organizational structures to solve the Aral Sea issues.
International efforts are also underway to help with the Aral problem. In January 1990, the Soviet Government signed an agreement with United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) for assistance in preparing an action plan for the rehabilitation of Aral Sea.26 Two major international conferences have also been held on the Aral problem: at Bloomington (Indiana) in July 1990 and at Nukus (Karakalpakstan) in October 1990. In 1995, World Bank also pledged $39 million, with the possibility of more than $200 million in additional loans later on, mainly to improve the ecological situation in the Aral Basin.27
In addition, evaluation and modeling of the water ecology system in the region, exposed to fall in the Aral Sea is being carried out jointly between UNESCO and German Government. Germany has also provided medical equipment and other aid of worth DM 4 million for Karakalpak hospitals.28 U.S Agency for International Development (USAID) in 1994 has provided US $3.8 million to Uzbekistan for the purpose of environmental protection.29 A project on the water supply to six Aral Sea towns was launched in 1995 by a research group of the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA), the Uzbek Ministry of Municipal Services and the State Committee for the Environment (Goskompriroda). Other organizations with their own remits in ecology are also at work in the Republic, such as the ECOSAN Committee for the Protection of Aral Sea and its Regions and the Aral International Charitable Association.
Actually, rehabilitating of the Aral Sea is a very complex problem and will require many years of effort. On the other hand, the well-known Uzbek poet Abdulla Oripov has stated this task as “impossible”. One translated stanza of this poem entitled “For the Aral” reads as:
A departed father may be found,
Mother’s place can be taken by a girl, sister,
But, what can you do if your sea dries up,
To whom shall you turn 0’ grieving soul?30