Environment - Central Asia - page 454

As the sea has shrunk, the climate around the lake has changed:
the air is drier, winters are colder and longer, and summers are hotter.
Every year 150,000 tons of salt and sand from the exposed bed is blown
hundreds of kilometres in big salt-dust sandstorms, which also pick up
residues of the chemicals from cultivated land and a former biological
weapons testing site. A visit to anywhere near the sea is a ride into a
nightmare of blighted towns, land and communities.
The catalogue of human health problems is awful: salt and dust are
blamed for cancers of the throat and oesophagus; poor drinking water
has been implicated in high rates of typhoid, paratyphoid, hepatitis and
dysentery; and the area has the highest infant mortality rates (over 10%)
in the former USSR, as well as high rates of birth deformities.

Extremes Along
the Silk Road, by
Nick Middleton,
devotes one-third
of the topic to
Kazakhstan, with
a trip out to the
former biological
weapons site at
vozrozhdenie
Island in the Aral
Sea.

Long-Term Solutions
Dozens of enquiries, projects and research teams have poked and prod-
ded the Aral problem; locals joke that if every scientist who visited the
Aral region had brought a bucket of water the problem would be over
by now. The initial outcry over the disaster seems to have largely evapo-
rated, along with the sea, and the focus has shifted from rehabilitating
the sea, to stabilising part of the sea and now stabilising the environment
around the sea.
In 2005 the little channel still connecting the northern and southern
seas was blocked by the Kok-Aral dam, preventing further water loss
from the northern sea, but condemning the southern sea to oblivion.
The northern sea has risen by 4m since then and should reach a state
of equilibrium by about 2025 (see p92). The southern sea, however, is
expected to split again and then dry up completely by 2020, though there
is a chance that three small lakes could be saved with the construction
of small dikes.

Other Environmental Problems
¨ Cotton is to blame for many of Central Asia's ills. Its cultivation demands high
levels of pesticides and fertilisers, which are now found in water, in human and
animal milk, and in vegetables and fruit.
¨ Kazakhstan suffers particularly from industrial pollution. Lake Balkhash
has been polluted by copper smelters, and bird and other lake life there is now
practically extinct. There are also concerns about oil and other pollution draining
into the Caspian Sea.
¨ Kyrgyzstan has a problem with radioactive seepage from Soviet-era uranium
mines. In 1998 almost two tonnes of sodium cyanide destined for the Kumtor gold
mine was spilled into the Barskoön River, which made its way into Lake Issyk-Köl.
¨ A combination of economic hardship, a crisis in funding for wildlife protection
and the opening of borders with China (the region's main market for illegal
trafficking in animal parts) has seen a huge rise in poaching since the fall of the
Soviet Union.
¨ Tens of thousands of critically endangered saiga antelope are killed every year
for their translucent horns, which are sold to Chinese medicine makers. Between
1993 and 2003, saiga numbers declined from more than one million to a shocking
40,000.
¨ Tens of thousands of musk deer, currently found in Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan and
Russia, have been killed in the past 20 years for their musk glands.
¨ In Kazakhstan more than 1000 Saker falcons are poached annually, most of
them sold to the Gulf as hunting birds.

For more on the
plight of the saiga
antelope, visit
www.saiga-
conservation.com