Interview on Aral Sea catastrophe

While world attention focuses on events in Afghanistan, experts maintain that no progress has been made in addressing one of the greatest socio-environmental disasters in the world - that of the Aral Sea basin. After decades of Soviet exploitation of desert rivers to increase cotton and rice production, former head of Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) in Uzbekistan, Ian Small, told IRIN that the international community had yet come up with a comprehensive solution to the crisis. Small said there was no common understanding of the crisis, while new studies continued to rework old, discredited solutions. Meanwhile, the onus has been left to the 4 million inhabitants of the basin to prove the link between a devastated environment and sharply deteriorating public health. QUESTION: The Aral Sea is a third of its former size today due to over-exploitation of river water upstream, bringing a host of negative impacts on the local population. What attempts have been made in the past to address the disaster? ANSWER: The Soviet plan - before Mikhail Gorbachev finally stopped it - was to re-divert one of the Siberian rivers through a huge canal to the Aral Sea. This was not feasible because of the huge structural work. In addition, it would only displace the problems of the sea to somewhere else in Siberia. The World Bank arrived in 1992, and concluded this was an emergency that needed a quick intervention to improve basic human conditions. Various conferences later, the emergency needs were dropped, and development ideas, including implementing large infrastructural projects, came to the fore. The idea of helping populations living on the edge fell out of the picture. This was a typical approach of the World Bank - a misconception that the free market would solve things. Q: And did it help? A: The international community has never worked in Central Asia until 1992. The region went from feudal systems to communist systems, to "welcome to the free market economy". Their independence was virtually unique in the world - it was by default. Following this, there was an emigration of Russians and others from Uzbekistan - a significant brain drain. The region’s capacity to cope had already been severely compromised due to the environmental disaster, but it was further compromised, because the majority of the technicians were Russian and left the country. This has influenced how the Uzbek government manages the Aral Sea crisis. All the data - everything that was ever known about the Aral Sea, including epidemiological studies and what was known on the islands was lost, because everyone left. It was further lost because academic and institutional links were cut off with Russian scientists who had been involved with the Aral Sea. Q: There are differing schools of thought about whether the problems of the Aral Sea are reversible or not. What’s your view? A: It would entail closing down the irrigation infrastructure and allowing water to flow unheeded into the Aral Sea for an indefinite period of time. But shutting down agriculture would shut down Central Asia. So it is impossible to revert to pre-existing conditions. UNESCO [United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation] has written a 25-year vision report. There are a few flaws. For example, Afghanistan is not taken into account, and the report looks mainly at the [Central Asian] basin and the upstream-downstream influence. There is a relationship between quality of life upstream and the quality of life downstream, but UNESCO paints a picture aggregated on the whole basin, which diminishes the reality of the situation in the Aral Sea area. There are other misconceptions. At first they forecasted how much water would be needed to reach the Aral Sea to restore it. Then they looked at trying to stabilise it. Now it appears that the plan is to simply let it go completely. UNESCO has said that 20 cubic kilometres is required to stabilise the sea. But you can’t wake up tomorrow and say 20 km head to that sea. When is that going to arrive at the Aral Sea? Today, or in five years' time? The disaster is an ongoing process, and there is no clarification as to when that water would have to reach the sea. In five years' time, then perhaps 20 km may not suffice. This was a snapshot picture of something that is an ongoing process. In addition, they only looked at salinisation in terms of agriculture, not in terms of human health. One thing I do find troubling is that there is still no common consensus on the state of affairs. This is to do with bad data, a lack of infrastructure and education to gather the right data. Nor is there a consensus on the future of the Aral Sea, such as, is it reversible or is it dead, is it stabilising, is it going to dry up? Q: On salination, experts have estimated that a drying up of the Aral Sea would release 15 billion tonnes of salt into the environment, with implications for both public health and agriculture. Are there any plans to counter this? A: Salinisation has affected 60 to 80 percent of the land in the Aral Sea. One proposal was to flush the salts off with water. But you can’t get rid of salts, you can only displace them, either deeper in the ground or downstream. What happens at present is that a farmer floods his field, plants a crop, and hopes that the crop matures before the salts percolate back up. When he's no longer able to recover crops before the salts come up, then the opportunity is lost, and that land is put out of production. That’s happening at a micro-level. At a macro-level the question is how long can these salts be suppressed? UNESCO's plan was to wash the salts downstream. Q: What are the implications of that? Would that compound the problem? A: For years the downstream was robbed of water and now the plan is to just flush down salts. This would turn the downstream area into a barren wasteland. In March at the Den Hague World Water Conference, MSF publicly raised this with UNESCO. Their response was "yes there would indeed be some communities that would not be as habitable as others". But we’re not talking about communities, we’re talking about 4 million people living in the Aral Sea area. Again, the solution to the basin - water management and salinisation - is to be found by displacing the environmental problems downstream. This is not dissimilar to the Soviet plan of taking water from Siberia, sending it to the Aral Sea, and thus displacing the Aral Sea problem to the Siberian area. Q. How is the current drought affecting the basin? A: One seriously has to question the long-term sustainability of the Aral Sea area. The impact of the drought is that it can accentuate the unsustainability of the region, but it remains just a blip on the map in geological terms. Some claim that the Aral Sea area has waxed and waned before, an indication that this has all happened and is therefore all fine. This is rubbish, because we are talking about human intervention here. Secondly, who cares? Even if it was natural, within one generation the fourth largest inland body of water is now the 10th. It's falling faster than mapmakers can keep up with. We have fishing communities that produced tens of thousands of tinned fish a year, who are now over 100 km away from the sea. We have an environment that has changed radically in every aspect, and all this has happened faster than a human being can adapt to, or cope with. So the drought is coming on top of what is already a chronic problem. What we see with the drought is the potential for a chronic problem to slip quite readily into an acute situation. We see that there is a very fine line between chronic and acute crisis. For example, TB [tuberculosis] is a symptom of the environmental problem. We need to be very careful about how we come to this conclusion. In environmental health, predicated on cause and effect, evidence is based on the eye of the beholder. Who sets the standard for evidence, who is responsible for making the case? This is part of articulating the Aral Sea problem. Something is wrong when the onus for proving that there is a relationship between the environmental disaster and human health is on the victim, but not on the perpetrators. There’s a precedent with cigarettes. For years, the onus was on the public to prove that cigarettes were harmful. It was not on the tobacco industry to prove that cigarettes were not harmful. In the same way, the Aral Sea population have to prove that the salts coming off the Aral Sea bed are harmful, that there are chemicals in the environment, that these chemicals are affecting human health, that the salts in the ground water are harmful to health. The burden of proof is on the population - not the perpetrator - which in this case is the environmental impact that results from the system that we have been locked into and the heritage of the Soviet system. Q. What's your view on the UN mission in July 2001 that looked at the implications of the drought in the region? A: The drought report was simplistic. It was supposed to concentrate on a relatively new phenomenon that had been occurring for the last two years. That report was designed to look at the acute aspects of the chronic problems - but their prescriptions harked back to what everyone was saying about the chronic problems eight to 10 years ago. So there was absolutely nothing new in the report - apart from a new description about the impact of the drought on a population already stretched thin in terms of their capacity to cope. More communities are without water, not the sea but communities without [potable and arable] water. That description is new, but the prescription is old. So the danger there is that what is a far-reaching, complex environmental disaster touching upon virtually every sphere of human environmental existence is being played down to a drought problem. The drought is becoming a superficial scapegoat for a much wider problem. The mission recognised the two causes to the drought - one is the reduction of water coming out of the sourced area of the Pamirs [Tajikistan] and the Ten-Shang mountains [Kyrgyzstan]. That’s the new part. They do report on the chronic mismanagement of vital water resources and water policies. But they are too naïve in expressing these solutions which have been expressed for the last 10 years. So how long are we going to be beating that drum? What solutions were given? Improved efficiency of water management, improved agricultural policies, improved coordination systems. It's the UN. When in doubt, let’s improve our coordination. One needs to be more concerned with outcome as opposed to process.