Central Asian leaders to gather for water summit

ALMATY (Reuters) – The five leaders of Central Asian nations will hold a summit this week to try to end a bitter row over water use in one of the world’s driest regions.

The dispute over cross-border water sharing in the vast region north of Afghanistan is a worry for its leaders who know how much stability in their ethnically diverse and potentially volatile nations depends on the scarce commodity.

The most emphatic symbol of the problem is the Aral Sea — lying between Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, and once the world’s fourth largest lake — which has shrunk by 70 percent as Moscow planners siphoned off water for cotton irrigation projects in Uzbekistan.

Other big problems are between upstream countries such as Kyrgyzstan, a mountainous nation with massive hydro resources, and downstream consumers such as Uzbekistan which has aggressively opposed construction of new hydro stations in the upstream nations.

The region’s most populous country, Uzbekistan is worried that the upstream states will gain political leverage over it by regulating water flows through new hydro plants.

Reuters