Water is a basic resource for agriculture, which is traditionally the largest source of livelihoods. If this livelihood is no longer available, people are often forced to search for job opportunities in the cities or turn to other, often illicit, ways to make a living. Migration—induced by lack of water, sudden droughts and floods, infrastructure con-struction (dams), pollution disasters, or livelihood loss—can produce tensions between local and incoming communities, especially when it increases pressure on already scarce resources (Carius et al., 2005).
Linked to change in land use (wheat instead of alfalfa) described in the section “food security” of this paper, the effect from lacking alfalfa rotations lead to decrease in forage for livestock, which caused a reduction in livestock numbers. As a result of it, the rural popula-tion lost income, as well as livelihood and pastures were increasingly overused. Apart from that, changes in the climate, mentioned in the section “Climate change and growing hydro-hegemony within the Amudarya river basin” above, will not only have an impact on water, land, and forest resources and on biodiversity, but also on human health and the condition of livestock in terms of animal health, nutri-tion, husbandry and fodder availability.
The bulk of cattle in the Amudarya river countries, are kept high proportion by very small household farms. Livestock production in these farms plays a significant social role as it constitutes the main asset for the livelihoods of rural communities.
Figure 5. Main water consumers in the Amudarya River Basin, %
(Source: Fröbrich et al., 2006)
Figure 6. Satisfaction of water needs in Aral Sea and environmental flows in
1995-2005 (Source: BVO 2006) Releases to
Aral Sanitary water releases Emergency releases
Deteriorating environmental conditions, combined with recurring drought, have resulted in agricultural and fisheries production de-clining by as much as 50%, equivalent to an economic disaster for almost 3 million people (including those in areas of Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan near the Aral Sea), whose main source of income was agriculture. The aggregate losses in Uzbekistan associated with mass migration from provinces near the Aral Sea between 1970 and 2001, are estimated to be above US$20 million. Many people still living in the high-migration areas, suffer protein and vitamin defi-ciencies resulting from malnutrition and extreme poverty. In addi-tion, as the migrants have generally been young the birth rate has decreased significantly.
The livelihoods of this population, especially in the river delta, strong-ly depend on the provision of ecosystem goods and services from its semi-natural ecosystems. The importance of the deltaic wetlands as an additional income source has even increased after the retreat of the Aral Sea as well as the socio-economic changes following the independence of the riparian nations from the former Soviet Union.
One of the serious consequences of the Aral disaster is the loss of the largest fisheries of the country, provides 20 tons of fish per year. Re-orientation of fishing from the sea to lake systems of Aral Sea could not hold a steady fall in fish production in the region. Therefore, fish-eries shifted to pond fish production and use of all, for this purpose suitable reservoirs, primarily Aydar-Arnasai lake system. Due to this change fish production and fishery redistributed their roles. A signifi-cant decline in fish production (in 51%) happened in 1992 - 1995 due to economic difficulties. The role of deltaic wetlands has become very evident during a severe drought in the years 2000/2001, when water deliveries to the northern delta were reduced to 18% of the mean (Figure 6). The most devastating loss in the history of fisheries in Aral Sea was observed in 2003, when volume of fish production has decreased to 131.6 ton.
Conclusions
To conclude, over the above mentioned three topics recommenda-tions could include the following.
Food Security Connected to the Economic and Policy Changes:
Continuing the food self-sufficiency policy will result in further deterioration of the natural resource base and food insecurity. The continued misuse of natural resources will also in its turn reduces productivity and farm incomes and increase rural poverty. There-fore, more emphasis should be put on sustainable land use practices land management (indigenous and introduced), such as traditional agro forestry, fencing with stones/trees, reclamation of steep hills for orchards, crop rotation, nursery development as well as establish-ment of agro service and consulting centers (extension services) to support farmers.
Climate Change and Growing Hydro-Hegemony within the Amu-darya River Basin: Since the independence of the Central Asian states, their interaction in regard to politics of water has been dynamic, pre-senting simultaneously cooperative and controversial tendencies.
Instead of forming a strong union, the states are today yearning to break free from the regional interdependencies. However, the devel-opment of the societies, the state of the environment and regional stability stay at risk in Central Asia as long as the states are not ca-pable of moving away from quarrelling about water allocations and towards sharing benefits beyond the river. Interstate water manage-ment in Central Asia has been constrained for major reasons such as the lack of financial, technical, organizational and professional capacities, lack of effective control and sanctions’ mechanism, the lack of political will for cooperation and the willingness to compro-mise external apportioning of blame instead of internal reforms. As water issues and water-energy linkages will likely remain high on the political agendas of the states, the coming years will show whether they will be able to cooperate on developing common water policy in the future.
Demographic Pressure and Mounting Poverty Due to Loss of Liveli-hoods and Deterioration of Living Standards: Economic and demo-graphic trends have a critical influence on natural resources use-poverty linkages. Rural use-poverty is closely linked with unsustainable land use leading to a decrease in soil fertility and loss of productive capacity of land. Peasant’s welfare could be raised through improved management of land and natural resources. However, this requires often more material and financial resources. Abolishment of state subsidies to agriculture after the collapse of the Soviet Union, poor material and technical base of households and individual farms as well as growth of rural poverty led to that fact that population got fewer possibilities to implement sustainable practices of economic activities. As result, unsustainable agricultural practices have led to land degradation as well as lower agricultural production and, con-sequently, contributed to the mounting poverty of the rural popula-tion. Increased deterioration of natural resources requires adoption of immediate steps. In this case, besides an introduction of new technologies for recovery and sustainable maintenance of soil fer-tility, retrieval and dissemination of traditional skills and knowledge, which for centuries helped to keep the land from degradation, are essential. Apart of this, search for suitable alternative income genera-tion for the rural populagenera-tion could be an opgenera-tion. Increased income for farmers will lead to growing demand for services in the villages and, thereby, to natural formation of a better labour market.
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