Land Reform in Uzbekistan

FIRST PARAGRAPH OF CHAPTER: Uzbekistan emerged as an independent state in September l99l with a legacy of an undiversified monocultural agriculture heavily specialized in cotton. During the Soviet era, cotton production in Uzbekistan registered persistent gains from the very beginning of collectivization in 1928, often at the expense of wheat and other cereals. Uzbekistan became the main supplier of raw cotton to the USSR, accounting for over 60 percent of cotton output in the USSR during the 1980s.The centrally prescribed production of cotton in a dry desert region was sustained through intensive irrigation from the two main Central Asian rivers, the Amu Darya and the Syr Darya , thus dramatically reducing the flow of water to the Aral Sea and directly contributing to the environmental disaster that had already become known under the Soviet regime as the 'Aral Sea catastrophe'.