Continuity and change: Land and water use reforms in rural Uzbekistan. Socio-economic and legal analyses for the region Khorezm (original) (raw)
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2005
Following the dissolution of the former Soviet Union and the collapse of existing trade arrangements, the newly independent states of Central Asia were left with the task of developing their own independent market economies. The region has undergone tremendous economic and social changes including significant agricultural reform mainly targeted at privatizing large collective farms that were established during the Soviet era. These reforms include the establishment of smaller private and cooperative farms in order to improve the efficiency and equity of existing production systems. Within Uzbekistan, this move to privatize farms has, in the majority of cases, led to declining productivity and net incomes. However, there have been instances where privatized farms and smaller collectives have been able to capitalize on these changes and perform at levels exceeding the norm. This Report identifies the key attributes of these successful farms that have been termed ''bright'&...
Land use, food and nutrition security – case study in rural Uzbekistan
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The present research is realised in the frame of the ZEU project "LUCA" (Land Use, Ecosystem Services and Human Welfare in Central Asia). LUCA builds a platform for joint analysis of land use effects for a whole region, involving participants from various countries of Central Asia. In the transition from planned to market economies, the Central Asian Republics experienced rising poverty, food insecurity and malnutrition as well as serious degradation of water and land resources. The process to a market oriented economy has not been adequately supported by national institutional development. It resulted in a reduced living standard. Land use strategies in Uzbekistan determine the level of food security. While the area of rangelands is vast, the livestock farming and production of grains, fruits and vegetables play a major role in food security and also are the basic source of rural population income. More than 60% of Uzbeks live in rural area. Uzbekistan produces adequate c...
Land and Water Policies in Uzbekistan
Post-Soviet Geography and Economics, 1996
Uzbekistan, with land area of 447.4 thousand sq. km and population of 20.7 million, is the third most populous among the former Soviet republics (after Russia and Ukraine) and the fifth largest (after Russia, Kazakhstan, Ukraine, and Turkmenistan). This is a desert country, however, in which only 10% of the territory is habitable land. During the Soviet era, Uzbekistan was designated as the main supplier of raw cotton and karakul skins to the USSR, and its agriculture accordingly specialized in these two products. Cotton remains the most attractive agricultural export commodity in independent Uzbekistan. Recognizing the serious economic inefficiency and environmental abuse problems inherited from its Soviet past, Uzbekistan has embarked since the delaration of independence in September 1991 on a program of reforms intended to achieve a transition from a command economy to a market-oriented economy. The reforms in the agricultural sector are aimed to improve the efficiency of production, thus increasing the output and eliminating the traditionally wasteful use of resources. This goal is to be accomplished through the process of land reform and farm restructuring, implemented simultaneously with price and trade policy reforms. The complex reform process is basically expected to change the producer incentives, strengthening profit orientation and thus increasing personal involvement and motivation. The present article reviews the current land and water policies in Uzbekistan and examines their adequacy in the light of these objectives. The analysis is largely based on the data collected by the authors in extensive field trips through the fertile parts of Uzbekistan in 1994-1995.2 Inherited Structure3 Despite its rich mineral resources and the fairly diversified industry created during the Soviet regime, Uzbekistan is still basically an agricultural country. Rural population is 60% of the total. Agriculture employs 40% of the labor force and accounts for 35% of net material product and of productive assets. Yet Uzbekistan is mostly desert, and its agriculture is concentrated in relatively small areas of irrigated arable land in oases and along the rivers. Desert and mountain pastures account for more than 80% of agricultural land in this country, and the entire rural population is concentrated on 4.5 million ha that is both arable and irrigated (16% of agricultural land). The effective density of rural population in Uzbekistan is 2.7 people per hectare of arable land, compared to only 0.5 in the European republics of the former Soviet Union (1990 data). Ignoring the expansive desert pastures, which are not of much use to individual farmers, there is only 0.37 ha of arable land per rural resident in Uzbekistan, compared to 2 ha per person in Ukraine and 0.75 ha per person in the densely populated Moldova. The high population density is actually increasing over time due to two factors. First, the cultural tradition in Uzbekistan encourages young people to stay close to their parents' homestead, so that there is very little migration of rural population to urban areas, despite employment opportunities. Second, the population growth rate in Uzbekistan, at 27.6 per 1000, is among the highest in the former Soviet Union, compared to 2.2 per 1000 in Russia and 6.5 per 1000 average for the FSU. Uzbekistan ranks third by family 1 size among the former Soviet republics: 5.5 people in an average family, compared to 3.2 in the Slavic republics and 3.5 the USSR average. During the last decade, the combination of these two factors produced a steady increase in the proportion of rural population in Uzbekistan, which grew from 57.7% in January 1984 to 61.0% in January 1994, while the arable and cultivated area remained practically unchanged. This trend is in contrast to the developments in most other former Soviet republics, where the proportion of rural population decreased between 1980 and 1990. High population pressure on the intrinsically limited resources of land usable for farming is one of the two main features of Uzbek agriculture. The other feature is the need for irrigation of arable land. Crop production and most of livestock production (with the exception of the karakul sheep) is confined mainly to irrigated areas. All cotton (Uzbekistan's main export product) is grown under irrigation, and grain production largely shifted to irrigated lands in the 1970s. The share of dry farming declined over the years, as irrigated areas increased from 78% of total cultivated land in 1965 to 98% in 1990. Production Overview Appropriately for a country specializing in cotton, agricultural production in Uzbekistan during the 1980s averaged two-thirds crop products and one-third livestock. The cultivated land was mostly sown to field crops, with orchards and vineyards taking up not more than one-tenth of the area. Among field crops, cotton accounted for 50% of the cropped area, with the rest under grain (25%), animal feed crops (20%), and vegetables (5%). Gross agricultural product increased at a rate of 1.6% per year between 1976 and 1990, rising from 8 billion rubles to 11 billion rubles (in constant 1983 prices). The growth was entirely due to the increase in the volume of livestock products, which doubled between 1976-1990, while the volume of crop production stagnated. Agricultural production in Uzbekistan did not collapse since independence. Gross agricultural product in 1994 and 1995 was about 15% lower than in 1990 (in constant prices), in contrast to other former Soviet republics and countries in East Central Europe, where agricultural output dropped by 30%-40% after 1990. To a large extent, this was achieved because Uzbekistan was growing cotton, an internationally marketable export commodity, for which ready markets could be found in Western Europe and Turkey after the disappearance of the traditional FSU demand. However, agricultural production shows a definite downward trend since 1990, which so far has not been reversed. Farm Organization The agriculture in Uzbekistan, as in all other Soviet republics, was traditionally organized in a dual system, in which large-scale collective and state farms coexisted in a symbiotic relationship with quasiprivate individual farming on subsidiary household plots.4 The large-scale farms were the backbone of commercial agriculture, feeding agricultural products into the state-controlled distribution system. Yet the subsidiary household plots produced much in excess of their subsistence needs, and typically sold their surplus products to the local large-scale farm, to the state-controlled consumer coop network, and partly also in nearby towns, where the bazaar was a well-established traditional institution. An average collective or state farm in Uzbekistan had 2000-3000 ha of arable land and employed around 1000 farm workers. Some 2000 collective and state farms jointly managed 95% of arable land in the country. An average household plot in Uzbekistan in the 1980s was 0.12 ha, and 2 million household plots cultivated 3% of arable land (Fig. 1). In terms of production, however, the household plots consistently accounted for 20%-25% of gross agricultural product over the recent decades, a much higher propbrtion than their share of land. This was accomplished mainly by concentration in livestock production. Collective and state farms provided young stock as well as feed and common pasture for household animals. In return, the