IWRA Proceedings

AbstractVery significant problem of water-energy resources use in Central Asia is the problem of water division. Today the positions of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan in this question consist in the request to preserve the existing limits of water division and allocation of additional limits for the Aral Sea and the Aral Shore. The positions of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan consist in reconsideration of these limits with increase of their shares (not for today, in the perspective). At the same time Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan demonstratively ground their requests on the increase of water resources limits by the fact that they were deprived by water division and did not get any compensation for this during the times of the USSR. As a consequence they possess now the least specific area of irrigated land per man in accordance with other republics, and they cannot even provide their population with the minimal level of consumption owing to their own agricultural production. In order to exclude this and, besides, taking into consideration the fact that today there is not any reliable and objective control of water use inside separate republics, it may have sense not only to exclude the Aral Shore, but the Aral Sea itself too from the number of water users, and instead if this to set limits to Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan. Thus the only possible settlement of the water division problem in the region remains reconsideration of the existed limits. As the world practice shows in today’s conditions its limits and needs for water that is the most moveable, changeable element of interrelations between the countries. They are identified by certain conditions and depend on the reforms, development strategies, population dynamics and many others carried out in the states. Kazakhstan may serve as a good evidence for this. From 1998 to 2002 its need for water in vegetative period has already decreased from 1100mln m3 up to 700mln m3 in the Syrdarya River basin at the expense of carried out market reforms and connected with this reconsideration of structure of agriculture. We can also offer a relatively smooth mechanism of reconsideration of the existing water division in the profit of earlier deprived countries of Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. Additional limits of water for them can be received not at the expense of direct reducing the limits for other countries (Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan), but owing to economy of water by implementation of more efficient technology in these countries, and at the same time preservation of former irrigated areas. The above-performed analysis of Central-Asian water-energy complex problems shows that on the whole the region possesses necessary resources and potential for normal sustainable development.