Land Audit Planned for Desert State
Land Audit Planned for Desert State
As a first step, the authorities intend to conduct an audit of all usable land in the country and look at the extent to which it is being used efficiently.
Speaking on December 15, President Gurbanguly Berdymuhammedov said Turkmenistan should grow grain crops in the north, where the climate is cooler, and cotton in more arid areas. He said the country needed to grow more fodder crops, fruit and vegetables and make wider use of crop rotation.
Production of two key crops, grain and cotton, needed to be increased by applying new methods to raise yields while saving water, he added.
Agricultural reforms were launched in March 2007, when the newly-elected president announced that he wanted to put an end to overstated production figures – a feature of the system under his predecessor Saparmurat Niazov – to improve the use of land and irrigation water, and make private farms more efficient.
Observers in the country say these ambitions have yet to translate into meaningful change. (See Turkmen Farm Reforms Failing, RCA No. 541, 11-Apr-08.)
“It is still unclear what the authorities want – to increase grain and cotton production, or to make rational use of the country’s limited land resources”, said an observer in Ashgabat, adding that these two directions would demand different approaches. At the same time, he added, talk increasing wheat and cotton production seems like a utopian dream.
Annadurdy Hadjiev, a Turkmen economic analyst based in Bulgaria, notes that since most of the country consists of desert, only four per cent of its territory counts as arable land. And that small amount of land suffers from low fertility levels and soil degradation, while lack of water and obsolete irrigation techniques mean a proportion of crops are lost every year.
Finally, poor irrigation means that vast areas of land are damaged by soil salinisation or become waterlogged and overgrown by reeds, rendering them unsuitable for farming.
NBCentralAsia analysts say that as well as an audit of existing farmland, the Turkmen government needs a strategy for restoring lands that have been lost to degradation.
According to Hadjiev, a combination of soil salinity, failure to rotate crops and other forms of poor land management will conspire to undermine any unrealistic plans the authorities try to impose on farmers.
(NBCentralAsia is an IWPR-funded project to create a multilingual news analysis and comment service for Central Asia, drawing on the expertise of a broad range of political observers across the region. The project ran from August 2006 to September 2007, covering all five regional states. With new funding, the service has resumed, covering Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.)
