ABSTRACT
Introduction Turkmenistan gained its independence in October 1991, when the Soviet Union was being dissolved. Together with all former Soviet republics it embarked on the previously uncharted road from a command economy to a market economy – the road that led through what has become generally known as ‘the transition’. One of the essential elements of transition in the entire post-Soviet space involved changes in land ownership and land use patterns, but in the five semiarid countries of Central Asia – including Turkmenistan – irrigation is essential and water is as important as land for agriculture. In this chapter we pursue one of the threads of transition research by examining the changes in land and water use that are taking place in Turkmenistan and assess their impact on the country’s agricultural sector. Turkmenistan is relatively inaccessible because of its isolationist political regime and little has been published on the process of transition in this country. The present contribution attempts to fill some of this gap in our knowledge at least with regard to the transition in agriculture. In the following second part of the chapter we will analyse the regional context of water resources and their distribution. In the third part we will focus our attention on water resources, in particular used for irrigation in agriculture, at the national level of Turkmenistan. This is followed by the fourth part, which is on searching for solutions, after which brief concluding remarks are presented.
