ABSTRACT
The majority of the world's population is now urban, and those living in rural areas are decreasing in number, although they remain the majority in many developing countries. World agriculture has been undergoing a global phenomenon of centralization since the end of the nineteenth century: for twenty-five of today's thirty most important agricultural products, more than a quarter of world production comes from one country or region. The agricultural sector was particularly hard hit by the collapse of the Soviet Union and then by the civil war; however, it returned largely to the same levels of production that it had enjoyed during the final years of the Soviet Union. In Central Asia, the area devoted to cotton increased from 441,000 hectares in 1914, to more than one million in 1940. Though Kazakh production decreased during the first half of the 1990s, it more than doubled between 1998 and 2005, in conjunction with the growing acreage allocated to cotton.
