Posted on 11/20/2009 5:03:03 PM PST by staffjam
Most foreign investors have been focused on Central Asia’s vast hydrocarbon resources and the extractive industries of energy and Minerals. But water is an issue of rising concern throughout the region as after years of soviet mismanagement geopolitical tensions are running high. These regional problems present outside companies willing to think outside the box with an incredible opportunity and a guaranteed red carpet welcome.
Simply put, the region’s scarce water resources were misused to satisfy the autarchic needs of the entire USSR, whose breakup in 1991 completely disrupted inter-republic trade patterns, leaving the Stans with the remnants of a centrally planned economy on which to attempt to build national post-Soviet economies amidst raging inflation. In 1992 the five countries established the Interstate Coordinating Water Commission (ICWC) to formulate a regional solution to the problem, but despite numerous meetings, 18 years of complex negotiations have yet definitively to resolve the complex hydrological issues surrounding the Amu Darya and Syr Darya rivers, leaving each country to pursue its own interests or bilateral relations.
(Excerpt) Read more at oilprice.com ...
Learn all you can about the death of the Aral Sea, once the fourth largest inland sea in the world, now mostly toxin-laden desert littered with the rusting ruins of fishing boats.
Through the Aral Sea seagoing vessels could at one time sail from the Black Sea all the way to the Tadjik capital of Dushanbe.
The slow death of the Aral sea was ordained by the early Bolshevik regime which deemed it as of no worth, and diverted its life line rivers the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya toward irrigation projects.
The Aral Sea only began in the 1980’s to yield to this decades long strangulation. The climate of all Central Asia has been turned to extremes of hot and cold without the moderating influence of the Aral Sea.
I know, I was deployed to Uzbekistan 2003-04.
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