EurasiaNet.org reports that upstream and downstream countries in Central Asia undertook tentative efforts in the early years of independence to coordinate on water usage, attempting to roughly follow rules that prevailed during the Soviet Union. Five-year plans devised by Soviet authorities in Moscow laid out how water should be shared among republics and which areas were to be privileged for irrigation. Basin Water Organizations were created to manage the allocation of water, but they only quite came together in the waning days of the Soviet regime.
Successor states agreed in 1992 on the formation of a body called the Interstate Commission for Water Coordination that was ostensibly intended to replicate the Soviet model. But this and a related initiative to try and mitigate the Aral Sea disaster made little headway in the face of divergent national interests. The chief hang-up was that water-rich but energy-resource-poor Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan could no longer count on the provision of energy and power supplies from nations like Uzbekistan, thereby invalidating the symbiotic logic required for any water agreement to work.
The Roghun project has long remained on the drawing board. Uzbekistan’s traditional position on the dam has been that its construction would pose a risk to the sustainability of the country’s important agricultural sector, in particular cotton cultivation. Concerns have not dissipated. Farmers in the Ferghana Valley remain anxious about the start to work on the dam.
“Stemming the Vakhsh could lead to shortages of water not just in Uzbekistan, but also in Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. They need to agree on how much water they are going to discharge. But the point is whose terms are they going to agree on. We farmers will see once spring comes around. If we don’t get enough water, we will have to reduce the size of the cotton crop,” Meliboi Madaminov, a farmer in the Ferghana region who cultivates cotton, wheat and vegetables, was quoted as saying by EurasiaNet.org.
Meanwhile, Aaron Wolf, a professor of geography at Oregon State University, argued that zero-sum fears were unfounded. “If you look at sustainable development within a basin, dams upstream can make sense. They can lengthen growing seasons downstream [and] can bolster dry season flow. They can help, especially in a time of climate change, as we lose storage of snow — in a lot of basins you need to bolster storage,” he told EurasiaNet.org.
If Uzbekistan does eschew its customary aggression toward Roghun, it will have to start looking at how it proposes to make it work to its advantage.
“The series of questions I would be asking now is; what are the mechanisms by which Uzbekistan can ensure that their downstream needs are going to be met, and that has to do with negotiating an agreement for a flow regime. Maybe even helping to jointly manage, or jointly finance the dam,” Wolf said.
For its part, Tajikistan is being careful to avoid ruffling its neighbor’s feathers.
According to Salini Impregilo, the Italian contractor tasked with overseeing construction of the Roghun dam, the work being done so far should not impact water flows.
“The diversion of the Vakhsh River … will be done with confluence of two diversion tunnels in a mountainside in order to keep the foundations of the dam dry. It is a very complex task that, because of the strength of the river, will only be able to be done during the winter months when the mountains are covered in snow and the water level is lower,” the company said on its website.
Tajik authorities have informally warned local media to refrain from any reporting on Roghun that has not been cleared by the state news agency. Sources in the government have told EurasiaNet.org this is to avoid the publication of any news that could sour the recent warming of relations with Uzbekistan.
But problematic technical decisions on how to progress with construction of Roghun — provided Tajikistan can find the large amounts of money needed to fund the work — will eventually have to be made.
“Tajikistan might decide to slowly fill the reservoir during the winter months with little consequence for Uzbekistan,” said Menga, the scholar at the University of Manchester. “However, the necessity to produce large amounts of hydroelectricity might lead Tajikistan to hurry things up, diverting more water from the Vakhsh River with consequences for downstream irrigation and potentially an exacerbation of the conflict.”
