Turkmen Farmers Urged to Sell Cotton on Open Market

Moves to encourage farmers in Turkmenistan to sell cotton on the open market have been met with a mix of scepticism and wary optimism, given that the authorities have simply confiscated surplus crops in the past.

At a cabinet meeting at the end of November, President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov said farmers could take any cotton left over from the quotas they are obliged to sell to the state and trade it on the national commodities exchange.

"We have to create an environment that enables farmers to sell cotton freely on the exchange," he said.

The 2010 cotton harvest was reported at 1.3 million tons, which officials said was higher than the national target for the first time in 19 years and far exceeded domestic needs.

After coming to power in 2007, Berdymuhammedov launched a agrarian reforms that included a law allowing farms to sell produce at free market prices, once they had met all prior contractual obligations. This legal provision has yet to be put into practice.

"More than three years have passed since a law was passed allowing farmers to sell surplus produce… yet neither the newspapers nor the TV have spoken about it or about farmers’ rights," a cotton farmer in the southeastern province of Mary said. "I fear that this time, too, the orders issued by our head of state will remain no more than words."

Farmers say the collection centres where they have to deliver a pre-set amount of cotton operate in a less than transparent manner, and try to take more from them even when they have handed over all they have to.

"They short-weight us," a farmer in Kunyaurgench in the northern Dashoguz region complained. "You give them one-and–a-half tons and they put down less on record less, saying the cotton is damp or impure."

Another farmer from Mary region said the heads of farming associations – the heirs of Soviet-era collective farms – sometimes seize cotton belonging to individual growers, and use it to top up the quotas of their own relatives, or else sell it on the sly on the commodity exchange.

One farmer confessed he had no idea what the commodities exchange was, still less how he could sell his surplus cotton.

"We’re uninformed farmers and we’ll get tricked,” he said. “After that, no one will want to trade there.”

A commentator in Dashoguz said it was essential to raise farmers’ awareness of how commodity trading worked.

"If Turkmen farmers acquire a good knowledge of economics and the law, they’ll be able to do stand out [for a good price] for the fruits of their labour,” he said, warning that if that did not happen, unscrupulous intermediaries would step in to prevent farmers selling directly.

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