|
Tajikistan
Environmental Problems
Most of Tajikistan's environmental problems are related to the
agricultural policies imposed on the country during the Soviet
period. By 1991 heavy use of mineral fertilizers and agricultural
chemicals was a major cause of pollution in the republic. Among
those chemicals were DDT, banned by international convention,
and several defoliants and herbicides. In addition to the damage
they have done to the air, land, and water, the chemicals have
contaminated the cottonseeds whose oil is used widely for cooking.
Cotton farmers and their families are at particular risk from
the overuse of agricultural chemicals, both from direct physical
contact in the field and from the use of the branches of cotton
plants at home for fuel. All of these toxic sources are believed
to contribute to a high incidence of maternal and child mortality
and birth defects. In 1994 the infant mortality rate was 43.2
per 1,000 births, the second highest rate among former Soviet
republics. The rate in 1990 had been 40.0 infant deaths per 1,000
births (see table 5, Appendix; Health Conditions, this ch.).
Cotton requires particularly intense irrigation (see Agriculture,
this ch.). In Tajikistan's cotton-growing regions, farms were
established in large, semiarid tracts and in tracts reclaimed
from the desert, but cotton's growing season is summer, when the
region receives virtually no rainfall. The 50 percent increase
in cotton cultivation mandated by Soviet and post-Soviet agricultural
planners between 1964 and 1994 consequently overtaxed the regional
water supply. Poorly designed irrigation networks led to massive
runoff, which increased soil salinity and carried toxic agricultural
chemicals downstream to other fields, the Aral Sea, and populated
areas of the region.
By the 1980s, nearly 90 percent of water use in Central Asia
was for agriculture. Of that quantity, nearly 75 percent came
from the Amu Darya and the Syrdariya, the chief tributaries of
the Aral Sea on the Kazakstan-Uzbekistan border to the northwest
of Tajikistan. As the desiccation of the Aral Sea came to international
attention in the 1980s, water-use policy became a contentious
issue between Soviet republics such as Tajikistan, where the main
rivers rise, and those farther downstream, including Uzbekistan.
By the end of the Soviet era, the central government had relinquished
central control of water-use policy for Central Asia, but the
republics had not agreed on an allocation policy.
Industry also causes pollution problems. A major offender is
the production of nonferrous metals. One of Tajikistan's leading
industrial sites, the aluminum plant at Regar (also known as Tursunzoda),
west of Dushanbe near the border with Uzbekistan, generates large
amounts of toxic waste gases that have been blamed for a sharp
increase in the number of birth defects among people who live
within range of its emissions.
In 1992 the Supreme Soviet of Tajikistan established a Ministry
of Environmental Protection. However, the enforcement activity
of the ministry was limited severely by the political upheavals
that plagued Tajikistan in its first years of independence (see
Transition to Post-Soviet Government, this ch.). The only registered
private environmental group in Tajikistan in the early 1990s was
a chapter of the Social-Ecological Alliance, the largest informal
environmental association in the former Soviet Union. The Tajikistani
branch's main functions have been to conduct environmental research
and to organize protests against the Roghun Hydroelectric Plant
project (see Energy, this ch.).
Data as of March 1996
|
