Amu Darya River flowing through Urgench, Uzbekistan. Screenshot from the video “Amu Darya: River to a Missing Sea | Preview | Coming Soon” from Journeyman Pictures‘ YouTube channel. Fair use.
This article was written by Shukhrat Hurramov and Konstantin Agafonov for Vlast.kz and published on March 14, 2025. An edited version is published on Global Voices under a media partnership agreement.
Rice is a pillar of Uzbekistan’s agriculture and cuisine. The climate crisis affecting the region’s two main rivers means that a shallower Amu Darya River is forcing farmers to leave traditional rice-growing areas and move to the banks of the Syr Darya River.
Over the past five years, the shortage of water, the main resource for growing rice, has become catastrophic. Since 2000, less and less water has been flowing into the lower and middle reaches of the Amu Darya. According to various forecasts, the runoff will keep decreasing in the coming years. The water offtake from the Amu Darya for irrigation is no longer enough to grow rice.
Rice to the bottom
Rice is one of the most important agricultural crops of Uzbekistan and the main components of the diet of its 37 million people. The country even has a “plov (pilaf) index,” similar to the American “Big Mac index.” These metrics are often used as unofficial ways of determining purchasing power parity.
Here is a YouTube video about plov in Uzbekistan.
In addition to being the main protagonist in a plate of plov, rice is present in many other dishes of Uzbek cuisine: mastava, shavla, moshkichiri, and others. According to official statistics, the annual per-capita rice consumption in Uzbekistan averages around 10 kilograms. Demand exceeds supply, forcing the import of rice from other countries.
Leaving ancestral lands
Khorezm, located in the northwest of the country, is one of the main rice-growing regions, traditionally producing around 40 percent of the country’s total harvest. Yet, years of drought and a shortage of water for irrigation have upended the life of local farmers.
For Bakhodir Elmurodov, 58, rice farming is a family tradition. He spent his childhood in his native Khorezm region among the rice fields on the banks of the Amu Darya, helping his parents run the farm. For him, rice is not just an agricultural crop, but the meaning of life, to which several generations of his ancestors dedicated themselves.
Bakhodir Elmurodov. Photo by Shukhrat Hurramov. Used with permission.
On the first day of the 2024 harvest, three people are loading the harvested grain into the combine at Elmurodov’s new farm.
“This is my first harvest grown in another, ‘foreign,’ field in the Syrdarya region, almost 1,000 kilometers from my native Khorezm. There is less water [there], and I was forced to leave my land, where I have grown rice all my life,” the farmer said.
Elmurodov hoped that over time the government would support rice growers facing water shortages. The government support came too late for him. Only in mid-February, the government of Uzbekistan adopted a resolution to support Khorezm rice growers, ten months after Elmurodov had relocated. Before leaving, Elmurodov realized that his native Khorezm region would soon cease to be suitable for rice growing.
Climate change is a core cause of water shortage in Central Asia. Higher temperatures and decreasing precipitation led to increased withdrawals from reservoirs, which cause river flow depletion. This is happening even despite the other consequence of climate change: The melting of glaciers, which provide only 25 percent of the total river flow in the region.
Inefficient irrigation technologies have turned the problem into a catastrophe. Uzbekistan wastes too much water, and not only in agriculture. In 2024, it was fourth in the world in terms of water consumption per capita.
Moving to Syrdarya
In April 2024, Elmurodov moved to the Syrdarya region. He rented 10 hectares of land and hired a team of four people to grow a new crop.
Conditions in this area are more suitable for growing rice, he argues, because the groundwater here is closer to the surface.
“Fill the furrow once and the water will not leak. In Khorezm, it quickly soaks into the soil. Here the water holds, so growing rice is very profitable,” the farmer said.
“Rice is a very water-intensive crop. Rice growers use large amounts of water, especially given our hot and dry climate. In Syrdarya, rice requires about 15–20,000 cubic meters of water per hectare, while in Khorezm around 25,000,” Vadim Sokolov, from the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea, told Vlast.
Vadim Sokolov. Photo by Shukhrat Hurramov. Used with permission.
Each hectare produced five tons of rice, for a total of 50 tons. Elmurodov believes that with another successful year, he will be able to resettle his family, who are still in Khorezm. He now plans to lease another 20 hectares of land.
Farmer Farkhod Karabekov from the Syrdarya region also hopes to try his luck in rice growing. Until 2017, his farm grew cotton and grains, before turning to melons and vegetables. In 2024 he decided to start growing rice, sowing it on 57 hectares.
“We decided to plant rice because of food security — so that our people would have enough food — and also economic aspects: rice prices have been rising sharply in the last few years. There is a deficit on the market,” the farmer said.
According to him, the year was successful: thanks to abundant natural rainfall, the rice fields yielded a rich harvest, around eight tons per hectare of the most expensive variety on the market, laser.
“Our rice growers are farmers from Khorezm with many years of experience. We agreed to cooperate with them. In terms of yield, our indicators turned out to be even better than in Khorezm,” Karabekov said.
Introducing new technologies
According to Sokolov, one of the main problems of agriculture in Uzbekistan is soil salinity. Salt reduces the productivity of the soil. To address this issue, farmers must wash salt out of the soil in the fall and winter. But this requires up to 4,000 cubic meters of water per hectare.
“New biotechnologies have emerged. Special bio-substances that ‘eat up’ salt can be used when washing the soil and when watering,” Sokolov said.
Karabekov’s farm also uses recycled water or drainage and waste water. Before using waste water from rice fields for repeated irrigation, it is necessary to study its chemical composition. To do this, the farmer had to invest almost UZS 500 million (USD 40,000) in new technologies.
Karabekov is happy with the result.
“The groundwater is shallow. We have been using recycled water for four years now. There has been no damage to the land. The salinity level is low and the yield is good.”
Farkhod Karabekov. Photo by Shukhrat Hurramov. Used with permission.
In recent years, Uzbekistan has begun to actively introduce water-saving technologies in irrigation, as well as grow drought-resistant varieties of crops, including rice.
“We are still in the top ten most wasteful countries in the world in terms of water use, but progress has already been made. On average, over the past four years (2021–2024), we have used 8.6 billion cubic meters less water than over the previous ten years (2011–2020),” Sokolov said.
In the last year, internal migrants in Uzbekistan have a new profile. They are no longer representatives of a cheap and disposable labor force without qualifications, but farmers with experience, leaving the banks of the ever shallower Amu Darya.
Those who want to continue working with rice are forced to move to Syrdarya, the only region where this is still possible despite the climate crisis. However, it is not clear whether the current scale of government support will be enough for farmers. More importantly, it is unclear whether there will be enough land and water in the Syrdarya region to meet the needs of all farmers.