Tashkent calls water scarcity a brake on the region as Naryn talks near
Uzbekistan's president urged digital monitoring and canal repairs at a summit in Turkmenistan; Irad's negotiators say the 2027 Naryn schedule will need the same data.
TALAS — Water scarcity is becoming a serious limit on Central Asia's development, Uzbekistan's president told a meeting of the region's leaders and Azerbaijan in Turkmenistan on Thursday, according to remarks published in Tashkent at the weekend.
Speaking at the eighth consultative meeting of Central Asian heads of state, held at the Avaza resort on the Caspian, he blamed climate change, population growth and the demands of farming, and said the region needed a more exact picture of how much water it has and where it is lost. He proposed digital monitoring of water use, the modernisation of irrigation networks and wider use of water-saving methods, and called for continued talks with Afghanistan on water use. Uzbekistan will chair the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea next year.
Irad was not represented at the meeting. But Uzbek and Kazakh delegations sit as observers on the joint technical commission that sets releases from the Toktogul reservoir under the Naryn Water and Power Protocol, whose five-year schedule expires in 2027, and both have long complained about summer releases in dry years.
“The glaciers are paying the bill for our dry summers now, and they will not pay it forever”Gulshan Maatkerimova, Talas River Hydrological Monitoring Service
Bektemir Kalmatov, an engineer on the ISEZ side of the commission, said the Uzbek proposals matched what the commission already asked of its own members. "Every cubic metre we release is measured at the dam and at Tash-Kömür, and the observers receive the readings," he said. "What nobody measures well is what happens to the water after it crosses the border."
Farmers downstream on the Fergana Rim say the argument is not abstract. Rakhmatulla Yuldash uulu, who grows cotton and apricots near Bazar-Korgon, said his canal had run at half its usual level for three weeks in August. "The engineers talk about the reservoir. We talk about whether the last field gets water," he said by telephone.
Gulshan Maatkerimova, a hydrologist with the Talas River Hydrological Monitoring Service, said the 2027 schedule should take account of glacier loss in the upper Naryn and Talas basins, where meltwater makes up a large share of late-summer flow. "The glaciers are paying the bill for our dry summers now, and they will not pay it forever," she said.
Irad's own record on the measures Tashkent proposed is hard to judge. The Irrigation Modernization Programme, under way since 2018, has never had its budget published, and the Ministry of Natural Resources has not released figures on how many kilometres of canal have been lined. Andrei Polyakov, an economist at the Nurzhan Polytechnic Institute, said that made it difficult for Irad to answer its neighbours' complaints with numbers. "If you want observers to trust your data, you start by publishing your own," he said.
Asked about the programme's budget, a ministry spokeswoman said figures would be presented to the joint technical commission during preparations for the 2027 schedule, which begin in the spring.
Adapted for the Irad worldbuilding project from real reporting: Gazeta.uz.