Turkmenistan: Fishing in Troubled Waters

"It’s been getting more pronounced in recent years,” Deryguly, a Turkmen fisherman on the Caspian Sea coast said. "The dirty pools of oil on the water must be poisoning the fish. It’s reducing their numbers, and we can’t get by without them."

Deryaguly, 62, is the latest in a family line of fishermen in Turkmenistan’s western province of Balkan.

The prize catch is sturgeon, a popular food in this part of Turkmenistan, but Deryaguly says the catch is thinning out. "This once plentiful product is in short supply now," he said.

Environmentalists believe the sea around Turkmenbashy, the port from which Deryaguly sails, is polluted by emissions from an oil refinery and also from a prestige construction project to build a resort called Avaza.

The Turkmen government seems to be responding. Although President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov did not refer to pollution when he unveiled plans to boost fishing production, he hinted that both the volume and quality of fish sold as food needed to improve.

Independent experts believe the catch is falling in Turkmenistan, particularly that of sturgeon, a number of species valued for their caviar as well as flesh.

An economist in Ashgabat, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that while official statistics suggested that commercial fishing output increased last year, the reality was that it was falling.

"The authorities won’t talk about the problem of falling fish stocks, but there’s some concern about it," he said.

Local observers say they would welcome any moves to reverse this situation, but warn that there are considerable challenges ahead – wide-scale poaching of sturgeon, the failure to conduct environmental impact assessments of Caspian oil and gas projects, and questions over the safety of shipping oil by tankers.

The decline seems to date since Turkmenistan became an independent state in 1991. Soviet collective fishing enterprises were broken up and commercial operator – and poachers too – moved in.

"Traders brought in cheap fine-mesh nets… and thousands of poor unemployed people started exterminating the entire fish population in barbaric fashion," one local pensioner said with regret.

Although food is a mainstay of the local diet, these days it is hard to find fresh fish on sale anywhere, even at the retail outlets of the Turkmenbalyk fishing agency. The catch is sold on to traders who can put it on the market at prices no local person can afford.

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