Drainage water polluting the Amudarya

The return of drainage water back to the Amudarya River is a major source of water contamination in northwestern Uzbekistan, leading to health implications for the local population, observers say. “Drinking water is very salty in Nukus [the capital of Karakalpakstan in the Aral Sea area],” local resident Gulya, 43, told IRIN in the Uzbek capital, Tashkent. “It is not a very pleasant thing to drink it but we have no other choice.” A local official told IRIN that drinking water in Karakalpakstan, especially in the delta of the Amudarya flowing into the Aral Sea, was of poor quality and foreigners visiting the region were usually buying bottled mineral water to avoid consuming locally piped water. “We are dealing with the issue of drainage water all over Karakalpakstan. Initially, we want to get the things sorted out in our area and then we can appeal to other provinces of Uzbekistan that discharge drainage water into Amudarya,” Yusup Kamalov, head of the Union for Protection of the Aral Sea and Amudarya (UPASA), a local NGO based in Nukus, told IRIN in Tashkent. Samarkand, Bukhara and Khorezm provinces were among those, he added. According to the UPASA, the Amudarya’s average annual flow is some 60 cu km, while discharge of drainage water back into the river is 10 cu km based on official figures - suggesting that every sixth cu km in the river’s flow was drainage water from irrigated fields. However, observers say these drainage waters are repeatedly used for irrigation, thus increasing the level of pollution in the river. A report published in 2004 on the results of research conducted by the UN-supported Global International Waters Assessment (GIWA) for the Aral Sea programme says that more than 95 percent of the total volume of water returned to the river in the region is formed by drainage waters from irrigated fields, which is why return waters have a high mineral content and are one of the main sources of pollution of surface and ground water. “Gradually the concentration of pollutants is increasing and at the delta where we live water becomes very polluted,” Kamalov emphasised. “More than 70 percent of the Amudarya territory within Uzbekistan has a water quality that is hazardous to health and more than 10 percent of water is in the category extremely hazardous,” the GIWA report added. “There are the remains of dissolving pesticides and [other] chemical fertilisers in drainage water. They are poisonous because they contain dioxins, which are now considered the most dangerous pollutants,” Kamalov highlighted. Some studies suggest that the content of mineral and organic substances, petrochemicals and heavy metals in parts of the Amudarya were two to three times higher than established levels. “The other thing is that sewerage waste is discharged into the Amudarya and this is very dangerous. In some towns, local authorities often discuss the issue of where to find money to discharge that town’s sewage waste into the drainage network,” the environmental activist maintained. “They don’t think that it is dirt, [potential] disease and etc. We drink this water, we irrigate crops with this water and from the very beginning our crops contain these things [pollutants],” he said. “That means we eat them. Through meat we get even higher concentrations of these substances in our bodies.” In 2001, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), in collaboration with the Uzbek health ministry and the World Health Organization (WHO), carried out a study in the area to assess dietary exposure to persistent organic pollutants (POP). The study revealed that high levels of dioxins were detected in food samples, particularly food samples of animal origin. An estimate of the average monthly intake of dioxins and dioxin-like chemicals among Karakalpakstan residents showed that the intake was almost three times higher than that recommended by WHO. Health effects include cancers, nervous system damage, reproductive and developmental disorders and disruption of the immune system, the report said. “What I noticed in the recent years is that our children’s health and immune system have become very weak and they easily become ill,” Janat, a mother of four, told IRIN before going back to her home in Nukus.