Uzbek farmers fear hunger after returning to fields in Kyrgyzstan to find battered crops

Uzbek farmers fear hunger in ravaged Kyrgyz fields

SHARK, Kyrgyzstan — Uzbek farmers, returning to Kyrgyzstan after fleeing a blood-drenched wave of ethnic violence, are finding their crops plundered, choked by weeds and withering in the fierce sun.

The implications of a ruined harvest in this poor agricultural country go beyond hunger, with the United Nations warning that food shortages and rising prices could spark another flare-up of the slaughter that devastated the south of this Central Asian country in June.

The United Nations said Thursday that it is sending an emergency mission to the south to assess the complex threat facing the thousands of farmers who live here. Kyrgyzstan depends on agriculture for 75 percent of its GDP.

“The farmers who grow for themselves have missed part of the summer harvest,” Dinara Rakhmanova, the head of the U.N. agriculture program in Kyrgyzstan, told The Associated Press. “Many of them have no money, and the refugees who have come back cannot sell their food at market because the markets have been destroyed.”

Starting June 10, mobs of ethnic Kyrgyz attacked the Uzbek minority, killing hundreds and leaving most of the main southern city of Osh in ruins, including all of its food bazaars.

As many as 400,000 Uzbeks, whose livelihoods depend mostly on growing or selling food, fled the violence. But the vast majority have now returned, with the farmers hoping to salvage some of the crops.

“We’re hoping at best to eke out enough to survive,” Khamid Urayimzhanov said in his half-hectare (one-acre) field of watermelon seedlings, emaciated after three weeks of neglect. “But if the cold comes sooner than usual the whole harvest will be lost. I have nothing else to sell, so it’s in the hands of God now.”

The odds seem stacked against them.

The price of fertilizer has more than doubled since April, when former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was overthrown in a bloody uprising that destabilized the country and brought a shaky new government to power.

That revolution was precipitated by spiking fuel and food prices, and the scarcity of basic resources also fanned the ethnic hatred that erupted in violence two months later.

Osh and the other major southern city Jalal-Abad now are tense but quiet, with food stands dotting the streets before the state-imposed curfew comes into force at 10 p.m. every night.

But in the fields, most of the farm hands refuse to work, because they do not believe the harvest will be rich enough for them to be paid in the fall. They are insisting on money up front, which many of the farmers in this community simply don’t have.

That has left Mastura Makhkamova and her family of four to tend their hectare of land themselves. On Friday, they were tilling the soil and sowing carrots, weeks later than normal and with little hope of selling the crops once they are harvested.

“We should be picking by now and taking it all to market,” she said, waving her work-mangled hands toward her field of corn, potatoes and sunflowers. “But all the Uzbek stalls have been burned down, and the Kyrgyz refuse to buy anything from us.”

She said her family rushed back on Saturday from a refugee camp in the Andijan region of neighboring Uzbekistan to tend the fields, but found that the potatoes they had planted late in March had been plundered and part of their fields trampled.

“If we don’t manage to sell this somehow, maybe on the roadside, then we’ll have nothing left for the winter. We’ll starve.”

Hundreds of miles north in the capital, Bishkek, the deputy head of the agriculture ministry warned that journalists should not exaggerate the threat of food shortages, as the government is taking steps “to make sure that peasants enter the winter with optimism.

“The work is going on at the same pace as before. No decline in the harvest is expected,” said the deputy minister, Samir Osmonaliyev.

According to U.N. data, however, spring wheat planting is down dramatically in many parts of the country, especially in the districts of Naryn and Issyk-Kul, where it has dropped 35 percent and 14 percent, respectively.

Osmonaliyev, the ministry official, said that the government would be distributing cheap diesel to “ease the farmers’ burden.” But that measure would be of little help to the Uzbeks in the south, who do virtually all of their farming by hand.

Land disputes and jealousy are believed to have been among the causes of the April revolution and this month’s eruption of ethnic violence, which was the worst in Kyrgyzstan’s history.

An Uzbek elder, or “white beard,” who declined to give his name for fear of being targeted by Kyrgyz authorities, said he fears a land grab from his neighbors as the resources in his community become more scarce.

“They know we are weakened now, so it’s only a matter of time before they try again to kick us off this land for good,” he said, looking out at the hectare of beets and corn he relies on to help feed his seven children and thirty grandchildren in this devastated land.

Associated Press Writer Leila Saralayeva contributed to this report from Bishkek.