Drought and disease threaten to set off a water war in volatile Central Asia. US scientists are fighting back with a data-crunching system that could pump fresh hope into the region. Call it the New Hydronomy.
I. GOING WITH THE FLOW, OR, THE DILEMMA
The plight of Karakalpakstan is a boon to medical science. This arid stretch of territory provides epidemiologists a rare look at what happens when mankind rapidly alters the ecosystem of an area twice the size of Texas. What happens is that nearly everyone — 80 percent of its 2 million people — gets sick.
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The population in this part of the world you've never heard of suffers from disproportionately high rates of kidney disease, tuberculosis, cancer, respiratory illnesses, immunological disorders, and mysterious neurological defects that doctors can't seem to diagnose. Life expectancy runs in the late forties, infants are 15 times more likely to die than in Western Europe, and 99 percent of pregnant mothers suffer from anemia. Recently, medical professionals here discovered a condition that causes children to lose their sense of taste.
It is no coincidence that the place has no water — at least not the kind you'd want to drink, or irrigate your crops with, or even run through your plumbing. Sandwiched between two deserts, Karakalpakstan is a semiautonomous province of western Uzbekistan, bordered by two other Central Asian states you can't place on a map, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan; it is capped by the Aral Sea and floats just about equidistant from the southern border of Russia, the western contour of China, and the northern edge of Iran. Forty years ago, Central Asia's largest river, the Amu Darya, carried an estimated 65 million acre-feet of water through the province just before spilling into the Aral Sea — about the discharge of the Missouri River at its confluence with the Mississippi in a very wet year. As it flowed through Karakalpakstan, the Amu's delta provided an oasis for 178 species of flora and fauna. It was abundant in game and fish, and in a hardy species of reed (used for everything from building construction to paper manufacturing) that was Karakalpakstan's most valuable commodity outside of seafood. Then came the Russians, who colonized most of Central Asia in the 1860s and were determined to turn the desert steppes green — or white, rather — with cotton. In the mid-20th century, the Soviets exercised their special brand of resource management to eke yet more cotton from the soil: In 1960, they started diverting 90 percent of the Amu Darya — and its sister river, the Syr Darya — to irrigate more land and fuel a "great leap forward" in textile production. They succeeded wildly, and from 1972 to 1986, Central Asia was the fourth-largest cotton producer in the world.
WATER'S BRUTAL CALCULUS: DOWNSTREAM GETS ONLY WHAT UPSTREAM DOESN'T USE.
The consequences were not long in coming. The Aral Sea — at one time the fourth-largest inland body of water on the globe — lost two-thirds of its volume and half of its surface area in four decades. The Karakalpak town of Moynaq, which boasted the second-largest fishing fleet on the Aral, now lies more than 70 miles from the shore. Violent dust storms have increased from once every five years to five times per year, depositing a fine layer of dirt, salt, and agricultural toxins on anything that happens to be outside a hermetically sealed room. "I remember my first flight in," says Dilorom Fayzieba, an Uzbek epidemiologist who has spent the past three years working out of the provincial capital, which bears the sadly apt name of Nukus. "As we were landing, I noticed that all the ground for miles around was white. I thought, 'Oh, it must have snowed.'" The layer of salt and chemical residues in the region is so thick it piles up in drifts against houses, fences, roads, and the corpses of long-expired cattle.
By the time the Amu Darya reaches Karakalpakstan, it has traveled more than 1,000 miles, irrigating millions of acres of cropland and providing tea and baths for millions of people. Along the way, water diverted from the flow may pass over irrigated cropland multiple times, each time collecting more poison and draining back into the river. Many seasons, depleted by its journey, the Amu trickles to nothing before reaching the Aral Sea. This is the brutal calculus of water management — that the land farthest downstream gets only what the upstream regions discard or don't use. International consensus on the best option for the Karakalpaks is simply to leave home, and most experts have given up on the Aral itself.
Why not attempt to seize back the flow — stop the draining and siphoning and rerouting that takes place upstream — so that Karakalpakstan can reclaim its share? Because the water upstream is spoken for, mostly by people not much better off than the Karakalpaks themselves. Turn off the tap on the power plants and cotton farms upstream, in order to revive the current below, and you'd just trade one world-class disaster for another.
Yet if it's too late to reverse the devastation of Karakalpakstan, it's not too late to contain it, to prevent the desiccation of still-surviving lands. Huge portions of the Syr and Amu Darya rivers still run; they begin in the 20,000-foot peaks of Central Asia's two mountainous countries (Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan) and meander through its three lowland nations (Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkmenistan). Before it vanishes in Karakalpakstan, the Amu Darya parallels the Syr Darya for miles, and the Syr Darya still faithfully empties into the sea. Together the two rivers form Central Asia's imperiled Fertile Crescent. The key is to keep them flowing.
II. MEASUREMENT MATTERS
Jeff Fredericks is leaning over a computer monitor in Tashkent — Uzbekistan's capital and the dirty, noisy, vibrant mixing pot of Central Asia — trying to figure out how to work the software that the US National Weather Service uses to manage American rivers. A PhD in civil engineering, Fredericks has spent most of his adult life working in developing countries on every aspect of water management, from building irrigation systems in Indonesia to advising government ministers in Egypt. Now he is a task leader for the Natural Resources Management Project, an effort funded by the US Agency for International Development to address Central Asia's water, oil, and gas problems. His brief: to help rebuild the nearly defunct network of measuring devices that collects river and weather data from around the five republics, and to persuade Central Asian governments to adopt the computer program that will make sense of it all.
Calling the River Forecast System a program, however, doesn't do it justice. The RFS is an extended suite of software applications developed by the Weather Service over the past 27 years to predict, up to six months in advance, the amount that will flow through any given body of moving water. In the broadest of strokes, the RFS is a powerful calculator married to an elaborate user interface. It takes the vast array of data (current river levels, reservoir releases, precipitation, air temperature, solar radiation, plant transpiration, to list a few) required to generate a forecast, automates the predictive algorithms, then colorfully represents them in detailed charts and graphs.
Today, the Unix-based RFS runs on workstations in all 13 of the regional river forecast centers in the US, as well as in countries like Egypt, Honduras, and South Africa. In ideal circumstances — at, say, the River Forecast Center at State College, Pennsylvania, which predicts flows in the mid-Atlantic watersheds — you can sit in front of a screen and sweep a cursor over a map that shows every body of water in the region, from the slimmest brook to the broad Delaware. Double-click on the Cook's Falls section of the Beaverkill River, and a line graph will appear, showing how many cubic feet per second passed between the Beaverkill's banks during a recent week. Click on the Delaware itself and find out how much water is likely to pass through Philadelphia on Wednesday.
Simply put, the RFS is a powerful planning tool. Just as you might use Quicken to assess whether to buy the Saturn or the Saab, public officials use the RFS to determine how much water to order from an upstream state. Private utilities rely on RFS output to gauge the quantity of water flowing into their plants; Pennsylvania Emergency Management officials use it to apprise the governor on the likelihood of floods. For policy setters at the state level — who negotiate water-sharing agreements between private parties, counties, irrigation districts, and separate states — the RFS is no less important than database technology is for your health insurer.
RFS output can automatically be delivered to a broad audience and even posted directly to a public Web site. This capability could have a huge impact on the Central Asian republics. "Right now, water managers in the region just don't know how much they have, or how much they can expect," says Fredericks. But the RFS can tell them. If widely adopted, it will publish a shared, trusted body of facts and projections, according to which the five republics and the districts within them can negotiate usage agreements. And because the RFS produces data in real time, rogues who take too much or give too little have nowhere to hide.
Like everything else, Fredericks' job changed after 9/11, when Central Asia became a focal point for the US. Last December, President Bush announced that he was tripling the amount of foreign aid the US gives Uzbekistan to $160 million. Much of this will take the form of military equipment, but a substantial portion — $24 million — will go directly to Fredericks' employer, the Natural Resources Management Project (NRMP). If this sounds like pocket change, consider that the annual budget for Uzbekistan's national weather service is about $500,000.
The US has many reasons to enhance its influence in Central Asia. The Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, a longtime ally of the Taliban, attempted a coup in Tashkent in 1999. The IMU and other militant Islamic groups enjoy passionate support in some areas, and there is a widespread perception that many of America's most wanted may still be hiding in remote areas of Central Asia, waiting to foment guerrilla uprisings, or at the very least recruit poor, angry youths for anti-American fundamentalist groups like al Qaeda. Add to this the untapped reservoirs of crude oil — an estimated 200 billion barrels — lying under the region, and it's clear that Washington has an incentive for maintaining stability there.
Yet water politics often produces the opposite. Central Asia's population is expected to grow substantially over the next decade; its water supply is not. "Even if you extract Karakalpakstan and the Aral Sea from the equation, demand will exceed supply in coming years," says Fredericks, and as Afghanistan rebuilds its irrigation systems, demand will increase further. Scarcity always contains the potential for conflict. And conflict in Central Asia is something the US is determined to prevent.
III. SAVING THE WORLD, ONE RIVER AT A TIME
Water is easily the most dazzling of the four elements. A drop of it can sustain millions of microscopic organisms; oceans of it determine the ellipse of our planet. It's unbeatable on a hot day, and if you spill it on your new dress, it'll dry without leaving a stain. You can surf in the stuff. Try doing that with earth, wind, or fire.
It is also increasingly in demand. To understand the role water plays in the collective imagination of people who don't have enough, first forget your associations with it: sprinklers, swimming pools, ice cubes, water gun fights, and long, hot showers. In short, all the things that evoke surplus. Now envision open sewers; 4-mile hikes with a water yoke; malfunctioning pumps; dysentery; acute, often fatal dehydration; and that first gulp of clean, fresh water after going three days without any.
"Water's weird," says Michael Glantz, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and editor of a seminal collection of essays on the Aral Sea crisis. "If you have it, you don't think about it. If you don't, you'll do anything to get it."
Weird, yes, and extremely powerful when you know how to control it. In the late 19th century, advances in materials science and mathematics made possible the construction of the massive concrete dam, which coincided with skyrocketing demand for electricity and irrigated crops. In the 20th century, dams sprang up like summer dandelions. Beginning in the 1940s, a new centrifugal water pump allowed farmers to tap into underground aquifers that had sat untouched for eons. By mid-century, water was transformed from a force of nature into a commodity.
The modern field of water management was born. Technically speaking, nearly every drop of fresh water in the US is "managed" — gathered into reservoirs; routed through gates, sluices, and drainage ditches; diverted for irrigation; treated for human consumption. Water management can mean New Orleans officials requesting increased flows into the Mississippi in order to shove encroaching salt water from the city's freshwater intakes. It can mean the state of New Jersey prohibiting the watering of lawns (as it did this past spring) to alleviate drought conditions, or a Utah farmer deciding to buy an extra 22 acre-feet to feed the 10 acres of wheat he just planted.
Whatever form it takes, water management requires the constant, detailed measurement of how much is available and, if at all possible, of how much will be available in the future. Before issuing a politically unpopular regulation, New Jersey water managers need to know exactly how much the state is currently using, how much will be saved if lawns go dry, and how much is coming in the weeks ahead. It is this network of measurements, in tandem with the powerful software that turns the numbers into policy, that helps America produce 43 percent of the world's corn with only 3 percent of the world's fresh water. The US has made measuring rivers into a science.
This is in sharp contrast to the undeveloped world, which is just the sort of vacuum that breeds evangelists like Curt Barrett. For the past decade, this mild, earnest hydrologist has labored to transfer American river forecasting technologies to public agencies around the world. He founded and directs a National Weather Service program that assists other countries in adopting, using, and maintaining the RFS — which he happens to know well, since he helped invent it. Barrett has worked with the countries of the Nile basin and was at the negotiations in 1995, when Israel, Palestine, and Jordan held peace talks over the sharing of the Jordan River. In April 2000, he traveled to Central Asia to assess how the system might function there. "It's a simple concept," says Barrett. If foreign governments can figure out a way to pay for it, he'll figure out a way to get it to them and teach the locals how it works.
But beyond offering mere technological advancement, the program, as Barrett sees it, promotes peace. This only sounds improbable. The United Nations estimates that by 2015, some 40 percent of the world's population will live in countries that don't have enough water, and competition within and among them will be fierce. "The wars of the next century will be fought over water," World Bank vice president Ismail Serageldin famously predicted in 1995, a forecast that has spawned countless foreign policy articles and entire careers in the field of water-conflict prevention. Among water's qualities is its total indifference to political boundaries: Sixty percent of the world's supply flows across at least one national border.
Signs of tension have long been apparent. In the late '50s, Egypt and Sudan engaged in a short-lived war over Egypt's plans for the High Aswan Dam, and competition over the Jordan River has several times escalated into armed hostilities between Israel and Syria. On a provincial level, conflicts have been much more numerous. Two years ago, along China's Yellow River in the Shandong Province (which, like Karakalpakstan, is the area farthest downstream), thousands of farmers fought with police over a government plan to divert more water from the already overtaxed river, and the same year, rioting over privatization in Bolivia nearly swept the ruling party out of office.
In water-stressed regions like Central Asia, the best way to avert conflict — and conserve the resource — is to agree to a sharing plan in advance. Here, downstream countries Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan depend on vast quantities for agriculture during the growing season. Upstream, however, in the mountainous countries where 90 percent of the region's water is stored in the form of snow and glacier fields, the object is to save water during the warm months so as to release it in winter, when it will turn the turbines that generate electricity for heating homes. Water released to dampen the fields of Kazakhstan in summer is useless in mountainous Kyrgyzstan, where demand for energy drops off significantly. Water released during the winter months is useless to low-lying Turkmenistan, since its fields are fallow this time of year.
There's no sense in drafting compromises to balance these needs, however, unless the parties agree on how much water is actually available and that each side is making good on its vows.
IV. "SHE WILL BE A METEOROLOGIST"
The Amu Darya is born in the otherworldly heights of the Hindu Kush and Pamir mountains, at the northwestern tip of the Himalayas. The river defines several national borders, a fact not incidental to its capacity to breed contention. As it follows its long northwesterly route to Karakalpakstan, it divides Tajikistan from Afghanistan, and, downstream, Uzbekistan from Turkmenistan. Farther north, the Syr Darya drains the extensive chain of peaks that dominates Kyrgyzstan, then flows down into the moneymaking cotton basket of the continent.
IN A LAND SO DEPENDENT ON WATER SUPPLY, METEOROLOGY IS AN ACT OF PATRIOTISM.
Both rivers originate in territory known to Western mountain climbers and virtually no other outsiders. Like endless rows of shark teeth, the peaks of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan extend into the infinite distance, full of acute angles and heart-stopping precipices. This is a long way from the Aral Sea, and looks it. The creeks are small, young, spirited. They run gin-clear and bound headlong down the mountains, bouncing off boulders, crashing down chutes.
The Al Archa Weather Station — two unassuming buildings nestled into a valley so narrow it seems you could throw a stone from one slope to the other — is one of the 30 operational meteorological data collection points in Kyrgyzstan. Its manager, Radion Zlotnitsky, will act as one nerve ending in the hydrometeorological network of the Aral Sea basin, collecting some of the real-time data the system needs if it's to produce useful forecasts. At 4:30 am, he trudges out to the instrument yard with a flashlight. Peering down into a recessed cup atop a pole, he checks to see if there has been precipitation. Next, he climbs a stepladder to look inside a box housing two types of thermometers, from which he determines both temperature and relative humidity. Finally, he cranes his head skyward to check the three poles that tower over the other gauges. From the exotic devices affixed to their tops, he estimates the velocity and direction of the wind. There is no need to measure snowfall, because the heavy blanketing of a few days ago has melted.
Finished with the morning's first measurements, Zlotnitsky goes back to the three-room shack that serves as home and office to send his findings to the central Kyrgyz weather service in the capital, Bishkek. There's a radio, but it isn't working, so Zlotnitsky taps out his data on a transmitter that looks as if it was built when Samuel Morse still drew breath. Later in the day, the Central Weather Service will aggregate what scant data it receives and pass it on to the regional center in Tashkent.
Zlotnitsky crawls back into bed. Three hours later, he'll wake up to repeat the process. The rest of the day, he'll stay busy fetching firewood for the stove and water from the river. At the end of the month, he'll likely receive $10 for his trouble.
If this sounds like a raw deal, Zlotnitsky isn't complaining. He is, in a way Western meteorologists probably wouldn't understand, born to his work. He grew up in an even more remote weather station, watching his mother and father go through the same methodical routine — except, says Zlotnitsky, they were a 20-mile snowshoe walk from the nearest road. His brother worked a weather station until recently, and his aunt's still in the service. Of his year-old daughter, Zlotnisky says, "She will also be a meteorologist." In Kyrgyzstan, meteorology is a guild system. It is also, in a country highly dependent on its water supply, an act of patriotism.
But saying that Central Asia desperately needs its Zlotnitskys isn't the same as saying Zlotnitskys are all Central Asia needs. "The amount of data they're getting just isn't adequate for the formation of reliable forecasts," says Fredericks. Since the Soviets pulled out, the number of working measurement stations — which range from manned facilities such as Al Archa to stationary mechanisms that take a single reading, like river level, automatically — have fallen from 1,200 to, by some estimates, less than 600, victims of scavengers, vandals, and simple disuse. The strength of the RFS lies in its ability to crunch data; no data, no crunching.
Western groups are trying to help. The NRMP and the Swiss Aral Sea Mission, working in cooperation with a UN organization, will install at least 30 automated meteorological and hydrological data stations by the end of next year. Some of these outposts will employ meteor-burst technology, which involves bouncing signals off nano-size particles of meteorites instead of satellites for cheap, faster transmission. "These stations," notes Muratbek Bakanov, director of Kyrgyzstan's Hydromet, "will greatly increase our ability to get an accurate idea of how much precipitation we have."
V. DAMS, DIKES, SPIGOTS
Another quality of water: It's always on the move. A water molecule falls, packed densely against other molecules, in the form of snow. It heats up, gets busy, stretches its legs, and becomes liquid. It tumbles into a creek, then into another creek and another, before sliding into a river and another river, and so on.
If you're a water molecule in Kyrgyzstan, you stand a good chance of winding up in the Toktogul Reservoir, partway along the journey from the high peaks of the Syr Darya basin to what's left of the Aral Sea. Toktogul is a man-made lake built by the Soviets in 1975. Its dam regulates flows to the agricultural fields downstream. The reservoir can collect a lot of water — nearly 16 million acre-feet, twice as much as the next biggest Central Asian reservoir — and while the water upstream still exhibits those boisterous, unrestrained mountain qualities, after Toktogul, it's man's river.
Like most dams, Toktogul has adjustable gates controlling incoming water, which turns the electricity-generating turbines. At the bottom of the dam, the water emerges as a much-changed river, here called the Naryn. Whoever works the gates at Toktogul determines the size of the new river, which at this point becomes that most politically charged of water bodies, a "transboundary" river. Government ministers fixate on the volume here. A UN/World Bank program, the Global Environmental Facility, has set up three automated stations on the water — one on either side of the Uzbekistan-Kyrgyzstan border and one monitoring the amount of water coming into the reservoir itself.
WATER TAKES THE PATH OF LEAST RESISTANCE. SO DOES DATA — AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.
The numbers produced by these stations have an intimate, causal relationship with the physical and political world. "Uzbekistan held military exercises up near its border with Kyrgyzstan a few years back," says one American official in Kyrgyzstan, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. "The objective of the exercise was to take a large [state installation], like a dam, for instance. It got pretty tense, and then the Kyrgyz turned off the tap at Toktogul. The Uzbeks stopped the exercise, and the tap was turned back on."
During the Soviet era, Toktogul dumped 75 percent of its annual discharge from June to September, when the water could be used as irrigation. Since then, however, the emerging interests of the newly formed nations have made this arrangement unacceptable. The young republics, it became clear, had their own discrete needs. So in 1998, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan negotiated a water-sharing treaty, set to expire this year. Kyrgyzstan agreed to release enough water during the growing season to meet Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan's irrigation needs. To do that it would end up producing electricity it didn't need. So the two downstream countries agreed to buy the surplus, paying for it with coal, gas, and oil the Kyrgyz could use to supplement their hydroelectric energy the next winter.
The agreement was a landmark achievement, similar to North America's Nafta, and is likely to be renewed for another five-year term. But it's not an easy one to fulfill, in part because the parties can't settle on realistic swaps for the future. Relying on mean figures derived from historical data, they can't anticipate extremes, which, when it comes to weather, happen all the time. "Right now, actual allocation is very different from what is planned," says Victor Dukhovny, director of the Interstate Coordination Water Commission of Central Asia, a group that helps draft and implement water-sharing agreements. "This problem has to be solved with more strict control of water usage and accurate monitoring and forecasting." For instance, with the RFS.
VI. ALL DATA LEADS TO TASHKENT
It is a commonplace that water flows downhill, always by the path of least resistance. In Central Asia, so does data. Both end up in Uzbekistan, whose capital, Tashkent, hosts the regional hydrometeorological center. Here, data from throughout Central Asia is processed, analyzed, and used to develop forecasts that are then disseminated to stakeholders across the region and to the World Meteorological Organization, which gathers weather data from all over the planet.
The mountains are not so far from Tashkent — you can see them on a clear day — but the rivers provide clear evidence that the city lies well downstream of the great snow and glacier fields of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. Flush with sediment, moving with the steady, plodding pace of a lowland river, the Chirchik flows out of the Chimgan Reservoir and through the suburbs of Tashkent before joining the Syr Darya farther south. It passes through concrete embankments and, just outside the city, a set of 14 gates, which, thanks to another US-funded project, can be controlled remotely. At a mouseclick the gates close, and the Chirchik changes course, pouring through a 30-foot-wide irrigation canal. Just upstream from the gates, a hydropost rises from the river. Measurements of stream discharge collected at this site tell managers how much water to divert into the canal. Like the measurements gathered by Zlotnitsky, this unmanned hydropost is another point in the RFS network that sends numbers to Tashkent.
Choosing Tashkent as the regional headquarters for the NRMP makes sense. The communications and travel hub of Central Asia, Tashkent is also, relatively speaking, a cosmopolitan city. Despite its associations in the West with Islamic fundamentalists and the repressive regime of its dictator, Islam Karimov, from a hotel window Tashkent could almost be Saint Petersburg or Sarajevo. Burkas are nowhere in evidence, miniskirts abound, and the packs of hoodlums who've gathered at the local car wash to drink vodka, listen to techno, and show off their car alarms are compelling evidence that Uzbekistan is not at risk for a Taliban-style takeover.
The fifth floor NRMP offices couldn't look more familiar to an American eye. A single hallway stretches from one end of the building to the other, with tidy, whitewashed offices on either side. Jeff Fredericks occupies one of them. A boyish 53, he resembles your favorite college science professor, bubbly with an enthusiasm for problem-solving that is infectious and occasionally maddening. Today he is welcoming two American hydrologists who have just arrived to lead the 14-day training session on the river forecasting system for a group of Uzbekis. And today there's some justification for his urgency: Americans spend months learning to work this system; what can the Uzbeks learn in two weeks?
That's the purview of Jay Day, a crisp, exacting engineer who will lead the seminar. Like Curt Barrett, Day helped develop the RFS in the '80s; since then, he has moved on to a private company, Riverside Technology, that works on contract for Barrett's National Weather Service program. Day has installed elements of the RFS in countries like Honduras, Panama, and Mexico. Recently, he has been customizing a version for Central Asia from his Fort Lewis, Colorado, office. On his first full workday in Tashkent, he's setting up the main workstation.
Modern-day river forecasting essentially relies on three sets of data, Day explains: historical weather and river measurements; real-time weather and river data; and weather predictions. The first is simply the historical record, going back as far as measurements were kept. The second is these same measurements, recorded in real time, or near real time. The third is not unlike the forecasts you see on the Weather Channel, except more localized and far more detailed. If two streams of equal size receive identical amounts of precipitation, will they carry an equal amount of water? Not if one runs through a meadow and the other through a forest. Consider the sunlight and humidity, slopes and drops, along with the density of ferns and the makeup of the stream's own mud. All of these factors are crunched together by the RFS to create a hydrological model.
But computer-powered modeling hits its real gee-whiz heights in the Ensemble Streamflow Prediction software, which piggybacks on the basic forecast software to provide a probabilistic prediction of streamflows. The ESP is especially useful in areas like the American Rockies or Central Asia, where precipitation falls in great quantities as snow in the winter, and in very small quantities in the summer. Because ice and snow melt in predictable patterns, the ESP can produce forecasts up to six months in advance.
THE HEARTLAND IS HOOKED ON "WHITE GOLD". CHANGE COULD CAUSE ECONOMIC FREE FALL.
For all his mastery of the RFS software, Jay Day's finest talents are on display at the first training session. The Uzbek scientists gather around a conference table. They hail from multiple departments and ministries within the government and have varying backgrounds and levels of expertise. Most have been granted only partial leave from their jobs to attend the seminar and will miss whole chunks of the sessions. It's enough to try an exacting hydrologist's patience, but Day never seems vexed. The lessons move at a glacial pace, but he powers ahead. Each bullet point on his PowerPoint slides gets translated not only into Russian but also into the unique Soviet technical lexicon. "We'll use the term time series a lot. Do you use that term?" he asks. Felix Pertziger, a glaciologist and unofficial chief translator, bounces the question to the others. Conversation in Russian ping-pongs around the table, and Pertziger finally turns back to Day. "Yes. We know that term." At the end of the second session, Day is impressed. "These guys really know their stuff."
VI. YOU CAN LEAD A HORSE …
Just southwest of Tashkent, the Syr Darya begins rolling through the largest irrigated section of Uzbekistan — some 9,300 square miles of cotton fields and rice paddies. It slides between two reservoirs before entering Kazakhstan on its 1,000-mile trip to the Aral Sea. Farther south, the Amu Darya has also entered the lowlands, and it, too, supplies irrigation for expanses of cotton. This is the heartland of Uzbekistan's "white gold."
Along this stretch, hundreds of trenches line the riverbanks, and rudimentary paddle wheels propel water down canals to the thousands of tiny farms that have succeeded the Soviets' vast collectives. Most of this liquid gets poured pell-mell down rows of plants, then drains back into the increasingly salty aquifer below or into the river through dilapidated drainage systems. Huge portions of it are wasted. NRMP's Ton Lennaerts, who has spent most of his six years in Central Asia working on agricultural reform, says that irrigation practices here expend so much water that it's difficult to conceive of improving efficiency without improving infrastructure first. Ideal systems — like Israel�s, for instance � use drip techniques, in which tubes funnel moisture directly to a plant�s roots, but this method is prohibitively expensive. Lennaerts is taking a more sensible approach: the creation of water users� associations that would, in Lennaerts� words, �fill the current management vacuum� and orchestrate more efficient uses of available flow than the tiny individual farms can do on their own. Lennaerts� clipped, professional manner gives way to the slightest hint of frustration, as he points out, �These associations would be the first ones.�
The downstream states of Central Asia, experts agree, simply cannot sustain their dependence on agriculture forever. Poor farming practices, dwindling water supply, and miserable water quality have already significantly decreased yields. And eventually, Uzbekistan, along with the other downstream countries, will have to turn from agriculture to alternative revenue sources like manufacturing in order to survive. Convincing them to do so, however, is not an easy task. They are hooked on irrigated cotton; half of Uzbekistan�s labor force works in the cotton industry. Any drastic reduction in plantings could throw the region into economic free fall. If there�s a desire among Central Asian policymakers to know how much water is in the system, there�s little incentive to use less of it.
Which brings us, finally, to Karakalpakstan, the stakeholder without a stake: Where there�s a water crisis, consequences also flow downstream. The parched province of Karakalpakstan and, increasingly, its neighbors upstream are paying the price � in resources, money, and health � for the reluctance of Central Asian governments to require farm reform.
So what can the RFS, a delicate, computerized hydrometeorological network abstracted from the day-to-day struggles of politics and life, accomplish in the face of these truths? Even if the entire community of water managers chooses to implement the new system, even if the quantity of data soars, even if, in short, the RFS can be brought online � �spun up,� in National Weather Service argot � what will the cotton growers do with the information?
Perhaps nothing different from what they are doing today. But the momentum for reform has been building for more than a decade, and reluctantly or not, the Central Asian governments will have to change their water-use habits if they want to stave off further ruin. Given the dangers of drought, along with Afghanistan�s growing water demands and the continued pressure to increase crop yields, better water management is Central Asia�s only realistic option. The countries are debating whether to begin charging for water use, and Uzbekistan has started turning a percentage of its farmland over to less-thirsty crops like rice. But the greatest contribution to averting more health disasters, water experts agree, lies in making compromises, signing agreements that ensure the sacrifices are shared.
Jeff Fredericks isn�t just punching a clock, waiting for his next foreign posting. He and other water experts working here genuinely believe that Central Asia could one day provide the world with a model of how a devastated region comes back from the brink. They imagine a time a few decades hence, when a robust network of data collection devices is married to top-tier software like that of the RFS, producing reliable, accurate data that is shared between countries as a matter of course. Upstream and downstream nations work together to ensure that both energy and food production needs are met, irrigation methods have improved to Western levels of efficiency, and stricter regulations have made the rivers run clear.
It is worth considering, in this light, that as much as scarcity breeds conflict, it also contains the potential for cooperation. Civilization�s first seeds were planted in an irrigated field in the Mesopotamian desert, where individual farmers came together to bend the river to their own purposes. With this in mind, it doesn�t seem like too much of a reach to contend that water management might be less about averting war than about its flip side: promoting peace.Go Back to Top. Skip To: Start of Article.