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Uzbekistan
Agriculture
Uzbekistan has the advantages of a warm climate, a long growing
season, and plentiful sources of water for irrigation. In the
Soviet period, those conditions offered high and reliable yields
of crops with specialized requirements. Soviet agricultural policy
applied Uzbekistan's favorable conditions mainly to cotton cultivation.
As Uzbekistan became a net exporter of cotton and a narrow range
of other agricultural products, however, it required large-scale
imports of grain and other foods that were not grown in sufficient
quantities in domestic fields.
Organization of Agriculture
In the last decades of Soviet rule, the private agricultural
sector produced about 25 percent of total farm output almost exclusively
on the small private plots of collective and state farmers and
nonagricultural households (the maximum private landholding was
one-half hectare). In the early 1990s, Uzbekistan's agriculture
still was dominated by collective and state farms, of which 2,108
were in operation in 1991. Because of this domination, average
farm size was more than 24,000 hectares, and the average number
of workers per farm was more than 1,100 in 1990. More than 99
percent of the value of agricultural production comes from irrigated
land (see table 21, Appendix).
Economic Structure of Agriculture
Uzbekistan's economy depends heavily on agricultural production.
As late as 1992, roughly 40 percent of its net material product
(NMP--see Glossary) was in agriculture, although only about 10
percent of the country's land area was cultivated. Cotton accounts
for 40 percent of the gross value of agricultural production.
But with such a small percentage of land available for farming,
the single-minded development of irrigated agriculture, without
regard to consumption of water or other natural resources, has
had adverse effects such as heavy salinization, erosion, and waterlogging
of agricultural soils, which inevitably have limited the land's
productivity. According to the Ministry of Land Reclamation and
Water Resources, for example, after expansion of agricultural
land under irrigation at a rate of more than 2 percent per year
between 1965 and 1986, conditions attributed to poor water management
had caused more than 3.4 million hectares to be taken out of production
in the Aral Sea Basin alone. According to other reports, about
44 percent of the irrigated land in Uzbekistan today is strongly
salinated. The regions of Uzbekistan most seriously affected by
salinization are the provinces of Syrdariya, Bukhoro, Khorazm,
and Jizzakh and the Karakalpakstan Republic (see fig. 13). Throughout
the 1980s, agricultural investments rose steadily, but net losses
rose at an even faster rate.
Cotton
Uzbekistan's main agricultural resource has long been its "white
gold," the vast amounts of cotton growing on its territory. Uzbekistan
always was the chief cotton-growing region of the Soviet Union,
accounting for 61 percent of total Soviet production; in the mid-1990s
it ranks as the fourth largest producer of cotton in the world
and the world's third largest cotton exporter. In 1991 Uzbekistan's
cotton yield was more than 4.6 million tons, of which more than
80 percent was classified in the top two quality grades. In 1987
roughly 40 percent of the workforce and more than half of all
irrigated land in Uzbekistan--more than 2 million hectares--were
devoted to cotton.
Other Crops
In light of increasing water shortages in Central Asia and the
end of the Soviet distribution system that guaranteed food imports,
government leaders have proposed reducing cotton cultivation in
favor of grain and other food plants to feed an increasingly impoverished
population. In fact, between 1987 and 1991 land planted to cotton
decreased by 16 percent, mainly in favor of grains and fruits
and vegetables. But Uzbekistan's short-term needs for hard currency
make dramatic declines in cotton cultivation unrealistic. Likewise,
Uzbekistan's entire existing agricultural infrastructure--irrigation
systems, configuration of fields, allocation and type of farm
machinery, and other characteristics--is geared toward cotton
production; shifting to other crops would require a massive overhaul
of the agricultural system and a risk that policy makers have
not wished to take in the early years of independence. Under these
circumstances, continued commitment to cotton is seen as a good
base for longer-term development and diversification.
In 1991 Uzbekistan's main agricultural products, aside from cotton,
were grains (primarily wheat, oats, corn, barley, and rice), fodder
crops, and fruits and vegetables (primarily potatoes, tomatoes,
grapes, and apples). That year 41 percent of cultivated land was
devoted to cotton, 32 percent to grains, 11 percent to fruits,
4 percent to vegetables, and 12 percent to other crops. In the
early 1990s, Uzbekistan produced the largest volume of fruits
and vegetables among the nations of the former Soviet Union. Because
Uzbekistan's yield per hectare of noncotton crops is consistently
below that for other countries with similar growing conditions,
experts believe that productivity can be improved significantly.
Data as of March 1996
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