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Kazakstan
Environmental Problems
The environment of Kazakstan has been badly damaged by human
activity. Most of the water in Kazakstan is polluted by industrial
effluents, pesticide and fertilizer residue, and, in some places,
radioactivity. The most visible damage has been to the Aral Sea,
which as recently as the 1970s was larger than any of the Great
Lakes of North America save Lake Superior. The sea began to shrink
rapidly when sharply increased irrigation and other demands on
the only significant tributaries, the Syrdariya and the Amu Darya
(the latter reaching the Aral from neighboring Uzbekistan), all
but eliminated inflow. By 1993 the Aral Sea had lost an estimated
60 percent of its volume, in the process breaking into three unconnected
segments. Increasing salinity and reduced habitat have killed
the Aral Sea's fish, hence destroying its once-active fishing
industry, and the receding shoreline has left the former port
of Aral'sk more than sixty kilometers from the water's edge. The
depletion of this large body of water has increased temperature
variations in the region, which in turn have had an impact on
agriculture. A much greater agricultural impact, however, has
come from the salt- and pesticide-laden soil that the wind is
known to carry as far away as the Himalaya Mountains and the Pacific
Ocean. Deposition of this heavily saline soil on nearby fields
effectively sterilizes them. Evidence suggests that salts, pesticides,
and residues of chemical fertilizers are also adversely affecting
human life around the former Aral Sea; infant mortality in the
region approaches 10 percent, compared with the 1991 national
rate of 2.7 percent.
By contrast, the water level of the Caspian Sea has been rising
steadily since 1978 for reasons that scientists have not been
able to explain fully. At the northern end of the sea, more than
a million hectares of land in Atyrau Province have been flooded.
Experts estimate that if current rates of increase persist, the
coastal city of Atyrau, eighty-eight other population centers,
and many of Kazakstan's Caspian oil fields could be submerged
by 2020.
Wind erosion has also had an impact in the northern and central
parts of the republic because of the introduction of wide-scale
dryland wheat farming. In the 1950s and 1960s, much soil was lost
when vast tracts of Kazakstan's prairies were plowed under as
part of Khrushchev's Virgin Lands agricultural project. By the
mid-1990s, an estimated 60 percent of the republic's pastureland
was in various stages of desertification.
Industrial pollution is a bigger concern in Kazakstan's manufacturing
cities, where aging factories pump huge quantities of unfiltered
pollutants into the air and groundwater. The capital, Almaty,
is particularly threatened, in part because of the postindependence
boom in private automobile ownership.
The gravest environmental threat to Kazakstan comes from radiation,
especially in the Semey (Semipalatinsk) region of the northeast,
where the Soviet Union tested almost 500 nuclear weapons, 116
of them above ground. Often, such tests were conducted without
evacuating or even alerting the local population. Although nuclear
testing was halted in 1990, radiation poisoning, birth defects,
severe anemia, and leukemia are very common in the area (see Health
Conditions, this ch.).
With some conspicuous exceptions, lip service has been the primary
official response to Kazakstan's ecological problems. In February
1989, opposition to Soviet nuclear testing and its ill effects
in Kazakstan led to the creation of one of the republic's largest
and most influential grass-roots movements, Nevada-Semipalatinsk,
which was founded by Kazak poet and public figure Olzhas Suleymenov.
In the first week of the movement's existence, Nevada-Semipalatinsk
gathered more than 2 million signatures from Kazakstanis of all
ethnic groups on a petition to Gorbachev demanding the end of
nuclear testing in Kazakstan. After a year of demonstrations and
protests, the test ban took effect in 1990. It remained in force
in 1996, although in 1995 at least one unexploded device reportedly
was still in position near Semey.
Once its major ecological objective was achieved, Nevada-Semipalatinsk
made various attempts to broaden into a more general political
movement; it has not pursued a broad ecological or "green" agenda.
A very small green party, Tagibat, made common cause with the
political opposition in the parliament of 1994.
The government has established a Ministry of Ecology and Bioresources,
with a separate administration for radioecology, but the ministry's
programs are underfunded and given low priority. In 1994 only
23 percent of budgeted funds were actually allotted to environmental
programs. Many official meetings and conferences are held (more
than 300 have been devoted to the problem of the Aral Sea alone),
but few practical programs have gone into operation. In 1994 the
World Bank (see Glossary), the International Monetary Fund (IMF--see
Glossary), and the United States Environmental Protection Agency
agreed to give Kazakstan US$62 million to help the country overcome
ecological problems.
Data as of March 1996
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