Description
In recent years, Uzbekistan embarked on an expansive development agenda supported by international development organisations, under the aegis of the ‘Green Economy’. Within the agricultural sector, this entails an overhaul of the former cotton-centred production model in favour of high-value crops and vertically integrated clusters, irrigated using the most up-to-date technologies. This paper argues that such a process entails ‘hydrosocial reterritorialisation’ of the rural landscape, legitimated by the ‘green’ agenda. In Uzbekistan, ‘hydrosocial reterritorialisation’ is characterised by a process of verticalization, where resource-sharing relations which predominated under the cotton monoculture are disembedded in favour of individualised, water-efficient, and increasingly ground-water reliant irrigation. Using the case of the pseudo-anonymised village of ‘Dostlik’ in the Samarkand region, this research looks at local manifestations of Uzbekistan’s current hydro-agrarian overhaul, to argue that by facilitating water grabbing, hydrosocial reterritorialisation becomes the locus of agrarian change in what eventually unravels as a process of ecological precarity for farmers who lack the means to compete with agribusiness. This is experienced most acutely by the scattered and informalised smallholding sector, whose challenges to access water raise the question around their continued importance in Uzbekistan’s agrarian future.
