Kazakhstan River

The waters of the Syr-Darya river are highly polluted and should not be used for irrigating crops, let alone for drinking, scientists from Kazakhstan have concluded.
Tests of the waters of Central Asia’s longest river – which flows for 2, 200 kilometers through Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan – found dangerous concentrations of metals including chromium, copper, nickel, mercury, molybdenum, and zinc, the Nur.kz site quoted scientists from South Kazakhstan State University as saying.
“The water of the Syr-Darya is not recommended for use either for agricultural needs or for the fishing industry, ” concluded Uylesbek Besterekov, one of the professors who took part in the three-year study funded by a €600, 000 NATO grant.
The scientists (who tested waters flowing for around 1, 000 kilometers through Kazakhstan, from the border with Uzbekistan up to the Aral Sea) could not pinpoint which industrial enterprise was the greatest polluter – or even which of the four countries through which the river flows is causing the most contamination. Even if the main polluters could be identified and stopped, it would take at least a decade for the waters to become clean, Besterekov said.
The findings – which back up 2009 data suggesting that the Syr-Darya’s waters were too dirty to drink or use in agriculture safely – are worrying for the Central Asian governments, since the river is used to irrigate crops that are then transported all over the region for public consumption. (It was the use of this river’s waters for agricultural irrigation – particularly for cotton – that led to the shrinking of the Aral Sea into which it empties.)
There are also hundreds of thousands of people living along the banks of the polluted river. Some of them rely on it for drinking water.
News that the Syr-Darya’s waters are a health hazard should be a wake-up call for the Central Asian governments to cooperate on a clean-up. However, the use of trans-border rivers is a major bone of contention between the states (Uzbekistan’s president, Islam Karimov, once warned it could lead to war), so the chances of the leaders setting their differences aside to tackle the pollution of Central Asia’s key waterway seem slim.