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The Aral Sea. It’s supposed to be the fourth largest inland sea in the world, but could disappear altogether in a decade, a victim of appalling farming practices that are still going on. It’s only taken fifty years of cotton and chemicals to do the damage … they’ve killed the land, and now it’s killing them. Irris Makler reports from what must surely be one of the most awful places on earth.

Moon/boat

Music

17+00

Makler: This, believe it or not, is the Aral Sea – at least that’s what it says on the map.

Now a more apt description would be the Aral desert - not a giver of life but a taker, nature’s punishment for mankind abusing its bounty.

17+20

The water is now more than 100 kilometres from here and experts predict it could disappear entirely by the end of this decade. That would mean that the fourth largest sea in the world would have dried up in just fifty years.

17+36

Music

Kids on sign

Makler: Muynak was once a prosperous seaside town – where people from far off Moscow came for their holidays. Now the sea has shrunk away.

18+03

Cannery

This cannery was once Muynak’s largest employer but there’s simply no fish left to can. The last of the 22 species that once thrived in the Aral Sea died out in the 1980s.

18+16

Tankimalov

Tankimalov: We used to transport everything in by sea -- food, coal, everything we needed. It was cheap -- and after the sea dried up life suddenly became difficult and the people were shocked.

18+34

Makler and Tankimalov

Makler: Aigali Tankimalov sailed the Aral Sea for 29 years, starting as a young man and rising to captain. Now the wreck of the vessel he commanded sits opposite his front door, a striking symbol of how the sea has given way to desert – but even worse to salt.

19+06

While a little salt is life sustaining too much destroys it.

Tankimalov: In our region, almost nothing grows. It's hard to grow anything,

19+32

Tankimalov

and it's hard for people -- salt concentrates in their joints. People can't walk for a long time -- unlike when the sea was here.

19+40

Sunset/camel

Music

19+54

Salt encrusted ground

Makler: A blanket of salt now envelops much of the region… sapping the ground of its fertility and the air of its freshness. So degraded is the environment that it’s no longer fit for human habitation. It’s a place wrecked by disease: cancer, anaemia, birth defects - and one of the world’s highest rates of tuberculosis.

20+05

Small

Super:

Ian Small

Medecins Sans Frontiers

Small: It is the world's largest, worst environmental disaster, man-made created disaster, which is affecting directly five million people in Central Asia

20+36

Doctors with kids

Medecins Sans Frontieres – Doctors Without Borders – is a charity that usually operates in war zones. For the first time it has set up a project devoted solely to an environmental catastrophe. The war here against tuberculosis.

20+54

Small

Small: That won’t do anything for the kidney diseases, for their cancers, for the high rates of anaemia, but if we are able to stop a few thousand people coughing to death every year from tuberculosis, that's fine by us.

21+13

Children in hospital

Makler: So how did this happen and who’s to blame? There are two culprits – communism and cotton.

21+34

Archival footage, cotton growing

The old Soviet Union decreed that its cotton be grown in the desert regions of Central Asia, irrigated by rivers that fed into the Aral Sea.

Newsreel narrator: We are communists and harvesting cotton, so needed by the country is our duty to the Party.

22+00

Makler: When it became clear that the land chosen wasn’t suited to the thirsty crop, Soviet planners simply increased the use of hazardous chemicals.

22+08

Newsreel narrator: The soil had to be cured -- just like a sick person is cured. This is our land -- and in order for it to survive we carry on the business of those who responded to Lenin's call to explore the 'hungry Steppe.'

Makler: A classic Soviet blunder and not the first time that the communists endangered the lives of their own citizens.

22+37

Music

Small

Small: Those people who were responsible for developing the scheme are now responsible for rectifying the problem and some people have come forward and acknowledged that indeed they knew from the very beginning that this development plan for Central Asia would cause very negative effects.

22+47

Folk dancers/musicians

Singing

23+06

Makler: Yet far from being brought to account for the excesses of the Soviet era, the Uzbek leadership dances to the same old tune.

23+15

Yet far from being brought to account for the excesses of the Soviet era, the Uzbek leadership dances to the same old tune. Nine years after independence, the old communist boss is still president, control remains centralised and freedom curtailed. The happy faces, as in the old days, mask a desperate need for reform. Many rural regions are worse off now than in Soviet times.

People harvesting cotton

For the cotton industry the harvest goes on as if nothing has happened. Uzbekistan remains the world's fifth largest cotton producer, and every year Uzbeks are obliged to leave their jobs to pick the national crop, press-ganged in a manner reminiscent of Stalin’s collectives.

23+46

Yet their efforts ensure that the region’s arable land is shrinking all the time. Irrigation has dramatically pushed up the amount of salt in the water table. Now more than a million hectares of land can no longer sustain any crops at all.

24+12

Negus

Super:

Ed Negus

Logistics Mgr, MSF

Negus: I think the first that it really hit me that something was up with the environment was when I drove from **, when you drive along the side of the road, you can see the salt on the soil, and I just thought, agh, that’s not right, because that reminds me, you know, of the old man’s farm back home. He’s got a bit of a salt issue.

24+29

Makler: Ed Negus – as you may have guessed – is Australian – the logistics manager for the Medecins Sans Frontieres Aral Sea program.

24+49

Ed is working to build waste disposal pits – as well as lots of toilets where none existed before. But so critical is the water shortage, he fears that mass evacuation may be the only answer.

25+00

Negus

Negus: You shudder to think really, if something drastic doesn’t happen with water and getting clean water just for the people to drink, then, yeah, it’s going to be a real mess. So what do you do? Do you try and move 300,000 people and if so where do you move them to and what do they do there?

25+16

View from plane

Music

Makler: Some of those who can have already gone – crossing thousands of kilometres of desert to escape the region’s problems.

25+45

Tankimalov

Tankimalov: The main problem is that the water is harmful. It's too salty -- you can't drink it. And that's why people are leaving.

25+53

Deserted library

Makler: And salt is eating into everything – even Muynak’s public library - which collapsed after salt corroded the bricks. The water here contains some six grams of salt per litre - three times the safe level for human consumption.

26+08

Where once sea breezes gently blew, comes this. The ferocious winds whip up dust from the old seabed, mingled with salt and a cocktail of poisons from the cotton industry, including DDT.

26+30

Small

Small: Those winds are now free to come in, pick up the deposited salts off the seabed and blow them back into the face of the population. It’s estimated that there are over 150,000 tonnes of toxic dust coming off the seabed. If and when the sea completely dries up they estimate there will be 15 billion tonnes of salt released into the environment.

26+46

Children at kindergarten

Makler: Such is the inheritance bequeathed to the toddlers at kindergarten number six, the lowest life expectancy in Uzbekistan. Their parents have TB and other diseases – and while the toddlers’ health is being monitored closely, they are already showing signs of severe problems with more certain to come as they get older.

27+14

Smandarova: In the future, if we don't think harder about our children they can expect stones disease, as we call it,

27+42

Smandarova

where because of the salt content stones are formed in all the organs -- kidneys, bladders… other organs.

27+54

Interior of kindergarten

Makler: The government seems unable or unwilling to confront the enormity of what it’s unleashed. It turned to the international community for help - but it’s simply too late.

28+10

Small

Small: When the World Bank arrived in ’92, 1992, they came very much with the mandate of restoring the Aral Sea. Slowly but surely over time they have dropped that whole objective and they are only now talking about restoring the delta. Indeed at this point in time it does look almost mathematically impossible to restore the sea. There’s even questions about, never mind restoration but stabilising the sea is even questionable.

28+24

Tankimalov

Tankimalov: I fear that if this continues the sea will dry up completely. The sea now looks like a small pool.

28+55

Music

29+10

Makler and Tankimalov

Makler: With the vessel he once captained marooned at his front door, Aigali Tankimalov is already 100 kilometres from the nearest water. In a decade, say the experts, all of it may be gone.

Music

It’s human folly on a momentous scale – the world’s fourth largest sea turned into a vast desolate salt pan in the space of fifty years.

29+37

Smandarova

Smandarova: You know, the shrinking of the sea is our greatest pain and the source of all our trouble. I think if the sea continues to dry up and there is no water left, what life can there be?

29+49

Credits:

Aral Sea:

Reporter: Irris Makler

Camera: Dave Martin

Editor: Garth Thomas