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Where Cotton is King
Drought has no respect for lines on a map. While Afghanistan has suffered
through three years of severe drought, Uzbekistan to the north has not
escaped unscathed. The cotton crop is off this year, and when King Cotton's
crown is askew, Uzbekistan wears a seedy look. The country, the world's
No. 3 cotton producer, derives 70 percent of its foreign revenues from
the crop. So fertile is the land that Czar Alexander II, when the American
Civil War choked off Russia's most important cotton source, sent his
army on a southward stomp to secure the fields of the Ferghana Valley.
When the Bolsheviks rose, they contracted blacks from the American South
as cotton consultants. The Soviets leached the life from much of the
land with massive doses of insecticides in a bid to boost cotton production.
Today, in the independent republic of Uzbekistan, the president sets
an annual quota and farm managers who fall short are thrown into jail.
Conversely, in good years, workers walk out of the fields when the quota
has been achieved, leaving cotton unpicked. Now, in a down year for
cotton, Uzbekistan is pressing for more and more U.S. aid in return
for use of its bases and refusing to open the one bridge over the Amu
Darya River by which aid can be efficiently delivered to Afghanistan,
where millions face the danger of starvation as winter closes in.
It's called the Friendship Bridge.
Ed Fowler
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(c) 2001 Millennium Relief & Development Services, vol. 1 no. 8
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