|
Tajikistan
Industry
Industrial development in Tajikistan has proceeded slowly and
inefficiently, both in the Soviet era and afterward. The civil
war and ensuing political turmoil kept production levels low in
the mid-1990s.
Historical Background
Tajikistan's industrial development began in earnest in the
late 1930s. The early emphasis was on processing cotton and manufacturing
construction materials. World War II was a major stimulus to industrial
expansion. The output of existing factories was increased to meet
wartime demands, and some factories were moved to the republic
from the European part of the Soviet Union to safeguard them from
the advancing German army.
Skilled workers who relocated to Tajikistan from points west
received preferential treatment, including substantially higher
wages than those paid to Tajiks; this practice continued long
after the war. Such migrants provided the bulk of the labor force
in many of the republic's industries through the end of the Soviet
era. Cotton textile mills and metallurgy, machine construction,
the aluminum smelting plant, and the chemical industry all had
disproportionately small percentages of Tajik workers, or none
at all.
The Vakhsh River valley in southern Tajikistan became a center
of extensive industrial development (see Topography and Drainage,
this ch.). The river was dammed at several points to provide water
for agriculture and cheap hydroelectric power, which stimulated
construction of factories in the area. Many of the plants in the
valley process agricultural products or provide agricultural materials
such as fertilizer. A large chemical plant also uses power from
the Vakhsh.
Industry in the 1990s
In the early 1990s, the configuration of industry continued
to reflect the specialized roles assigned to Tajikistan within
the Soviet system, hindering advancement of enterprises that utilized
the republic's natural resources most effectively. The civil war
also made industrial reorganization problematic.
In 1991 industry and construction contributed 43.5 percent of
the country's NMP, of which industry's share was 30.6 percent--but
those sectors employed only 20.4 percent of the work force. Tajikistan's
only heavy manufacturing industries are aluminum and chemical
production and a very small machinery and metalworking industry.
The most important light industries are food processing and fabric
and carpet weaving. After declining an estimated 40 percent between
1990 and 1993, industrial production dropped another 31 percent
in 1994. Declines in the Dushanbe and Khujand regions exceeded
that figure. The output of only five industrial products increased
in 1994: high-voltage electrical equipment, textile equipment,
winding machines, processed cereals, and salt. The most serious
declines were in chemicals, engineering, metal processing, building
materials, light industry, and food processing. According to government
reports, production declines generally were greater in privately
owned industries than in state enterprises.
Tajikistan's overall industrial production capacity was underutilized
in the first half of the 1990s. The steadily rising cost of raw
materials, fuel, and energy combined with the obsolescence of
production equipment and the lack of qualified industrial workers
to place Tajikistani industrial products, which never had been
of especially high quality, at a great disadvantage in foreign
markets.
Aluminum
Tajikistan's major industrial enterprise is the aluminum processing
plant at Regar in the western part of the republic. When the plant
opened in 1975, it included the world's largest aluminum smelter,
with a capacity of 500,000 tons per year. But difficulties arose
in the early 1990s because of the civil war and unreliable raw
material supply. Aluminum production and quality began to decline
in 1992 because Azerbaijan and Russia cut the supply of semiprocessed
alumina upon which the plant depended. By 1995 the plant's management
was predicting a yearly output of 240,000 tons, still less than
half the maximum capacity. The prolonged decline was caused by
outmoded equipment, low world prices for aluminum, the emigration
of much of the plant's skilled labor force, difficulties in obtaining
raw materials, and continued disruption resulting from the civil
war.
Mining
In the Soviet period, several minerals, including antimony,
mercury, molybdenum, and tungsten, were mined in Tajikistan; the
Soviet system assigned Tajikistan to supply specific raw or partially
processed goods to other parts of the Soviet Union. For example,
nearly all of Tajikistan's gold went to Uzbekistan for processing.
However, in the 1990s the presence in Tajikistan of a hitherto-secret
uranium-mining and preliminary-processing operation became public
for the first time. The operation, whose labor force included
political prisoners and members of nationalities deported by Stalin
from certain autonomous republics of the Russian Republic, may
have accounted for almost one-third of total mining in the Soviet
Union. According to official Tajikistani reports, the mines were
exhausted by 1990.
Data as of March 1996
|
