260 BICHSEL, MUKHABBATOV, SHERFEDINOV
Uzbekistan, along with Kazakhstan, somehow had to attend to the management
of the Syr Darya’s water.
Independence led to the establishment of national
water management orga-
nizations, with each country establishing its own ministries and departments to
supervise water resources. Thus, Kyrgyzstan formed the Ministry of Agriculture,
Water Management, and Processing Industries. Within that ministry, a Department
of Water Management was placed in charge of irrigation.
28
Here and elsewhere in
Central Asia the new ministries retained many of the Soviet organizational struc-
tures, and even the USSR’s laws governing the allocation of water. Yet the newly
independent states faced drastically reduced funding, leaving water management
organizations with declining salary pools, shrunken operating budgets, and little
money for equipment.
29
These
difficulties, along with concerns over
the efficiency of water usage,
prompted the new states to introduce cost-recovery measures and “irrigation man-
agement transfer,” which they did to varying degrees. Cost-recovery measures were
built on the new affirmation that water was no longer a free good, as had been the
case under the USSR’s socialist system, but should be compensated for with an ir-
rigation service fee. “Irrigation management transfers” devolved water management
and even the ownership of tertiary irrigation infrastructures to local water users,
thereby attempting to increase their rights and responsibilities. This involved the
creation of Water User Associations (WUAs),
30
in line
with fundamental changes
in land ownership, specifically the restructuring or dismantling of the former state
and collective farms and the privatization of agricultural production.
31
The disintegration of the Soviet Union necessitated the establishment of new
supra-national institutions for managing the water resources of Central Asia. First,
the Almaty Agreement of 1992 established the Interstate Commission for Water
Coordination (ICWC) as the highest decision-making body for all matters pertain-
ing to the regulation, efficient use, and protection of interstate watercourses and
bodies of water.
32
The ICWC consists of leading water officials from each of the
five countries; these officials meet several times annually to set allocations and
quotas and to resolve disputes. The ICWC operates through four executive bodies:
the Syr Darya River RBA, the Amu Darya RBA, the Scientific Information Center
(SIC) and the Secretariat. The RBAs deal with technical aspects of actual water
distribution among the states in the respective basin. The SIC prepares analyses
for the ICWC and is responsible for conservation issues. A Secretariat facilitates
the work of the ICWC.
33
The end of the centralized Soviet system of water management also necessitated
new agreements among the new Central Asian states to regulate the Syr Darya and
Amu Darya. The initial Almaty Agreement signed in 1992 by all Central Asian
states established joint ownership and management of the region’s water resources,
while retaining national control over crops, industrial goods, and electric power
generated by their use. It also stressed the need for cooperation among the riparian
states.
34
A number of additional agreements followed, some of them pertaining to
LAND, WATER, AND ECOLOGY 261
all Central Asia and others to specific rivers. Most relevant for the Ferghana Val-
ley are the annual agreements, reached in 1995 and subsequent years, among Syr
Darya River riparian states concerning the allocation of water and energy. These
were then folded into the Syr Darya Framework Agreement for 1998–2003, which
confirmed the states’ commitment to common solutions and involved efforts to bal-
ance upstream needs for energy with downstream needs for water.
35
This framework
agreement would be extended for a further five years.
It goes without saying that the new states are all complex entities, and their
positions on specific issues should neither be personified nor treated in isolation
from each other. Neither the processes of domestic reform nor inter-state negotia-
tions have turned out to be smooth or predictable. Thus, the parliamentary debates
in Kyrgyzstan which preceded the final passage of the “Law on the Interstate Use
of Water Objects, Water Resources, and Water Management Installations” were
intense, with experts disagreeing among themselves. This law asserted that water
possesses economic value, that it is owned by the state, and that neighbors should
compensate the government of Kyrgyzstan for providing it.
36
Similarly, Central
Asian water experts have engaged in controversies over water quotas, the responsi-
bilities of inter-state water management institutions, and other issues over the course
of many rounds of workshops and conferences.
37
Some experts from Kyrgyzstan
charge that the ICWC, owing to its institutional setup and location in Uzbekistan,
is biased in favor of downstream countries;
38
these countries in turn respond that
their upstream neighbors are preventing reasonable solutions beneficial to everyone.
There is also a clash of views between some local and international experts, as
shown by the controversy over the role of international law in Central Asian water
management addressed in two articles of the
New York University Environmental
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