Photo Essay: The Aral Sea’s Isle of Despair
In 1960, the town of Muynak was a prosperous island, encircled by the abundant waters of the Aral Sea, in which local fishermen caught about 20,000 tons of fish a year. Today, Muynak is 100 miles from the Aral's shore, surrounded by a dusty wasteland. The town has become a seaport without a sea, a fishing town without fish.
What happened? The Aral Sea disappeared. Forty years ago, the Aral was the fourth-largest lake in the world. Today the sea, which straddles the border between Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan, has shrunk by half, creating a vast toxic desert. The Aral and the area around it have suffered an almost complete ecological collapse, devastating the region known as Karakalpakstan.
The crisis is largely an artificial creation, a consequence of the misguided decisions made by Soviet central planners to radically increase the former USSR's cotton production. They chose Central Asia, in particular Uzbekistan, as the site for this enterprise. To irrigate the crops in such an arid region they diverted water from the two main rivers, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya, into a massive irrigation system: several hundred thousand miles of unlined canals gouged out of the Central Asian desert.
To a certain extent, the project succeeded: Uzbekistan is now the fourth largest cotton producer in the world. But at a price. The Syr Darya and the Amu Darya are the sole sources of fresh water for the Aral. With 90 percent of its water supply choked off, the Sea began receding sharply. Over the past four decades, its water level has dropped over 50 feet. The fishing industry has collapsed, leaving tens of thousands without jobs.
Muynak is not the only casualty. The shrinking sea has also endangered the more than 3 million people who live around it. As the water retreated, it left behind two million acres of dried seabed. These flats are encrusted with huge amounts of toxic fertilizers and pesticides (including DDT) - runoff from the fields. Frequent dust storms have spread millions of tons of this poison throughout the region.
The toxins are almost certainly contributing to severe health problems throughout the Aral region. The district's death rate for respiratory illness is extremely high. In some areas, 95 percent of pregnant women suffer from anemia; birth defects and cancer occur at alarming rates.
The crisis is not a secret. In fact it has become almost a cottage industry. Over the past ten years, Western donors, including the World Bank and the UN, have spent hundreds of millions of dollars to ease the problem. But in Karakalpakstan, little has changed. Critics blame a combination of incompetence, inertia and corruption. Part of the problem is the Uzbek government itself, which gives lip service to solving the crisis, but is more concerned with watering the cotton fields, which provide most of the country's hard currency. In addition, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya run through all five Central Asian countries, each of which has its own pressing water needs.