Testing the Amudar'ya river to improve water quality

The first comprehensive and systematic survey of water quality on the Turkmen stretch of the mighty Amudar'ya river - one of Central Asia's key water sources - is under way, IRIN learnt on Tuesday. "The Tajiks and Uzbeks are doing nothing, there's nobody dealing with water quality on the river, so we need proper information in order to move forward," Ashir Muhamedoo, the chief of the Amudar'ya middle water authority, told IRIN in Turkmenabad. Ecological degradation and high pollution levels have been evident for decades in the lower reaches of the Amudar'ya. This was the direct impact of water-resource manipulation through the construction of dams and barrages and the diversion of massive amounts of water, primarily for agriculture. In the early 1960s, the central planning authority of the Soviet Union devised the "Aral Sea Plan" to transform the region into its cotton belt. Vast irrigation projects were undertaken in subsequent years, with the irrigated area expanding by over one-third between 1965 and 1988. Intensive cotton monoculture, pesticide use and salinisation, along with the region's industrial pollution, have degraded water quality, resulting in high rates of disease and infant mortality in countries dependent on the Amudar'ya. "Polluted drainage water containing high levels of pesticides have been the main problem on our part of the river," Usaman Saparov of the Turkmen Ministry of Nature Protection, told IRIN. Hence the pressing need for accurate information on the quality of the water. The programme in Turkmenistan involves drawing water from four different points along a 700-km stretch of the river, and sending the samples to the capital, Ashgabat, for testing. But not only pesticides are polluting the river. "We're aware of sulphates, heavy metals, mercury, as well as huge amounts of raw sewage being dumped into the river, but we don't know how much or quite where it comes from," Saparov added. The Amudar'ya is the main source of water for the desert nation of Turkmenistan, supplying about 80 percent of its expanding needs. Although the government plans to construct a huge lake in the middle of the desert as a long-term solution to its water needs, experts are divided over whether such a plan can succeed. For the forseeable future, the Amudar'ya is likely to remain Turkmenistan's principal water source. The river is formed by glacial meltwater from the high mountain ranges of the Pamir and Tien Shan in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan before flowing through Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. The United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) is assisting with the testing programme at a cost of US $60,000, and the UK government's Department for International Development has donated about $25,000 towards it. In a region possessing limited water resources coupled with growing demand, the need to preserve and improve the resources is paramount, observers say. "When the testing is complete, the [Turkmen] government can take the information to the various regional water bodies and make its case convincingly for a proper cleanup of the Amudar'ya," Batyr Hadjiyev, a UNDP environmental programme analyst based in Ashgabat, told IRIN. High pollution levels in the Amudar'ya are also contributing to the ecological disaster that is the Aral Sea. The river still flows into it, but because of the huge diversions along the river, the sea - once the world's fourth-largest inland sea - has shrunk to about one-third of its volume and less that half its area since 1960. The sea's shrinkage has left bare and dry a large area of what was once its bed, from which large quantities of wind-blown, salt-laden dust have been mountingly wreaking havoc on the region's agriculture and ecosystems and on its population's health. Desertification has caused large-scale loss of plant and animal life and loss of arable land, changed climatic conditions, depleted yields on the remaining cultivated land and destroyed historical and cultural monuments.