As mentioned earlier, Uzbekistan remains one of the world’s largest cotton producers. This is the result of the prioritization of cotton cultivation ordered by the central Soviet administration throughout its period of governance (Abdullaev et al. 2005:113). The Soviet administration wanted to make the USSR self-sufficient and forced some of its republics to become highly specialized producers of certain commodities for consumption both within the internal and export markets (ibid.). Thus Uzbekistan became a territory of intensive cotton cultivation, producing seventy percent of the entire Soviet supply (ibid.).
This industry employed about forty percent of the republic’s total labour force and accounted for more than sixty percent of its total economic input (ibid.:115). By the early 1980s, the USSR had become one of the major exporters of cotton, accounting for more than a fifth of world’s production and only lagging behind China (ibid.).
In contemporary Uzbekistan, the Soviet legacy has been preserved in both the cotton monoculture and the high level of state control of the industry. The production and international trading of cotton is strictly regulated by the government (Rudenko 2009:285) with cotton’s contribution accounting for twenty-five percent of Uzbekistan’s gross domestic product (Muradov and Ilkhamov 2014:11) and total agricultural exports accounting for more than forty percent of total exports (World Food Programme 2008). State control in the post-Soviet era operates through imposing quotas on ‘output and area, a state purchase system and price, quantity of production, and controls on
farm outputs’ (Abdullaev et al. 2005:115). Directly after independence in 1991, all agricultural produce, except that grown in kitchen gardens, were required to be sold to the state. Five years later, state quotas were removed for some agricultural crops but not for cotton (Abdullaev et al. 2005:115). After a series of agrarian land reforms, described at the beginning of this chapter, private farmers (or ‘fermers’ in the local language) became the sole suppliers of cotton, although cotton farms remain state property. Today, private farmers are mandated to plant cotton and they must sow a certain area of land with the plant, else they are penalized (Abdullaev et al. 2005:115). Furthermore, private farmers are obligated to supply all of the cotton they grow (with a quota on the minimum required) to the state at a pre-determined rate.
Needless to say, the internal purchasing price for cotton is almost half the international market price (Rudenko 2009:285–60). In return for their cotton, farmers are entitled to free land tenure and receive support from government-sponsored agencies in the form of seeds, fertilizers, machinery and irrigation. In legal terms, becoming a private farmer meant that an individual selected or appointed by the local administration was registered as such and signed a contract with the Ministry of Agriculture and Water Resources of Uzbekistan where all the described quotas and government-sponsored services were laid out.
In contrast, smallholders (or dehkans in the local language) came into existence very differently, in response to the breakdown of the centralized Soviet system when millions of rural people lost their livelihoods due to decreases in production, shortfalls of basic food products, and lack of previously-provided social infrastructure (Kandiyoti 2002, Abdullaev et al. 2005:115). In 1994, to increase food security and respond to growing poverty, the government withdrew some land from collective farms and distributed it among the rural population, formally describing these owners as dehkans who were granted permanent and inheritable rights to the land (Zayforodnaya 2006).
There are thus two distinct sets of goals and expectations for private farmers and for smallholders: to provide the state with a crop required to maintain the national export industry; and to respond to the apparently inefficient agricultural governance with a quick and effective solution to an unexpected side-effect of the agrarian reforms. In both cases, however, the availability of irrigation, a controversial issue in Uzbekistan, is key.
WUAs were established to address the problem of irrigation scarcity and distribute water equally and democratically. However, as my findings show, the reality fails to live up to this promise. I argue that WUAs are an integral part of the policy that supports the large-scale production of cotton by private farmers and exists to help these farmers increase their productivity, rather than to assist the most vulnerable groups.
The vulnerability of smallholders was evident from the outset of the research. I soon learned that agricultural produce from their gardens and small plots of land are absolutely essential for food and for animal breeding. In most cases these families do not have any other source of income, except anything that male family members who have left the village can send back. The majority of families have been broken up by labour migration, and the remittances sent home by these men provide the only source of meaningful cash income. ‘There is no job for our men here in the village’, a female smallholder told me. This puzzled me because the cultivation of 0.13 ha of land, breeding animals, and selling crops and livestock appeared to provide enough work for entire family. However, as I later discovered, generating hard cash revenue from their plot is so labour-intensive that going abroad as a migrant worker becomes a much more attractive option financially, despite the costly price these men have to pay on a personal level. As a result, I observed highly feminized smallhold agriculture characterized by the increasing difficulty of securing the necessary support for agricultural production, chiefly irrigation. At the same time, my interviews with the male private farmers indicated that they suffered no limitations in terms of the provision of water and services (Kim 2014:68–80). Neither did their family structure seem to have been affected by outmigration.
This brought me back to my research problematic and my consideration of the different impacts a social organization can have on different constituencies, i.e., the smallholders versus the private farmers.
As I looked more closely at the everyday work of the irrigators in the local WUA, I realized that giving precedence to the irrigation needs of the private farmers over those of the smallholders was not something that these professional irrigators ‘just did’. On the contrary, their work was socially organized and coordinated by institutional texts such as irrigation schedules, monitoring, and report forms. Water engineers did their jobs professionally and responsibly by using these forms in
their everyday work. Below (in Figure 4.1) I provide an example of a monitoring sheet used by all water engineers in the WUA called ‘kontur’.
Fig. 4.1 Kontur (monitoring sheet) translated by the author.
Image © Elena Kim (2014), CC BY 4.0
In the words of water engineer Ikram,2 he ‘controls the number of the watered hectares [and] looks at the kontur. They have numbers that correspond to the fermers’ land. [He] marks which land has been watered and informs the WUA’.
If we attend to the column in the kontur called ‘Kontur Number’ we see different numbers each corresponding to a specific piece of land in the village. Once a piece of land is numbered by the land surveyor, it is marked as a kontur. From Ikram, we learned that these konturs mark only the land cultivated by private farmers. In my second interview with him the WUA chairperson supported this observation, as he stated that ‘myrabs [water engineers] use the konturs of the farmer’s land only’.
This is an example in which a text directed the attention of the WUA to a particular category of water user. Using the kontur, water engineers ensured that efficient provision of water was only provided to the
2 Here and hereafter pseudonyms are used.
selected areas. I tracked the use of konturs in the WUA and discovered that the information they provided fed into a standardized reporting form, which itself contained the sub-heading ‘Fermer’s land’. I learned that the standardized reporting form and the kontur were, in fact, appendices to the WUA’s Charter. The Charter itself states that its main areas of activity are the delivery and distribution of water among its members. Membership is acquired by signing an agreement with the WUA. As the WUA chairperson told me, the ‘agreement is the most important; if there is an agreement, there is water; no agreement means
“no water”’.
However, he also indicated that not everybody is eligible to sign. As WUA staff explained:
An agreement with smallholders cannot be signed because they do not have a stamp, while farmers have the contract with the State. They have cotton and wheat […], while they (smallholders) do not have a stamp.
All the private farmers were in a position to sign such an agreement with the WUA because they were already legal entities who had a contract with the state to provide cotton. For this reason they were equipped with their own stamps, without which they could not be private farmers at all. The situation of smallholders was entirely different in this respect.
Their existence as a category of agricultural producers was the result of a forced measure and an ad hoc decision rather than a strategic choice;
their crops provided subsistence rather than contributing to state commerce. Since smallholders did not have to supply the state with their crops and did not have to enter into contracts with the state, they were not recognized as legal entities and were not granted stamps. The WUA was organized to operate as a ‘closed club’ with membership limited to private farmers, thus failing to address the needs of the poorer smallholders. As an institutional ethnographer, I understood that the exclusionary practices of the WUA developed not because of deliberate efforts by individuals but because they were translocally incentivized: the WUA Charter and its rules on membership and eligibility, which directed the work of its employees, was part of a larger institutional system. It was therefore important to focus my analysis on the institutional origins of the WUA Charter. I found out that what was happening locally was linked, through a number of translocal, textual
and discursive connections, to Uzbekistan’s global cotton trade. The policy of the WUA establishment in Uzbekistan formed an inherent part of the state’s agricultural reforms that aimed to increase agricultural productivity. This policy was put into practice in an appendix document regulating the set up of private farming entities throughout Uzbekistan.
This appendix, which included the definition and roles of WUAs, was accompanied by the documentation needed to set up this type of organization, such as blueprints for the Charter, agreements, reporting forms, konturs, etc. This package was circulated throughout Uzbekistan, and the village I studied also relied on it for its everyday operations.
Thus the activities of individual water engineers in the village were directed by a sequence of texts that were coordinated by the state with the aim of maximizing produce for international trade. Their everyday work, with its unintended negative impact on smallholders, was thus translocally coordinated.