Personal Networks of Agricultural Knowledge in the Cotton-Growing Communities of Southern Tajikistan
2012; George Washington University; Volume: 20; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1940-4603
Autores Tópico(s)Agriculture, Land Use, Rural Development
ResumoThis article investigates the role personal kinship and patron-client networks play in the generation, exchange and transfer of agricultural knowledge. It examines the elite-run cotton economy in the Shahritus District of Khatlon Province, which is located in the south-western region of Tajikistan. The province accounts for around 17 percent of the country's area and about 35 percent of its 7.3 million population. The rural inhabitants of the province constitute 83 percent of its overall population.1In the pre-Soviet period, the subtropical lowland areas of Khatlon province were sparsely inhabited by native Tajiks and nomadic and seminomadic Uzbeks and Arabs. After World War II, the government began irrigating about 320,000 hectares of land in the province, subsequently changing it into one of the central cotton-growing regions of the Soviet Union.2 Due to a lack of manpower for the expansive new cotton plantations, the government relocated people to the farms from the mountainous communities of eastern, central and northern Tajikistan, as well as the Ferghana valley and the south-eastern parts of Uzbekistan. As a result, the central and south-western districts of the province, where I conducted field research,3 constitute ethnically heterogeneous communities of Tajiks, Uzbeks, Arabs, Turkmen, Kyrgyz and others.4The Soviet government established land and other agricultural resources as state properties and thereby employed peasants in the state-run cooperative enterprises and collective farms (kolkhozes and sovkhozes). In lowland areas, such as the Khatlon province, the collective farms were specialized in certain crops. Cotton mono-cropping was one such form of production that was expected to mobilize peasants as a unified economic and social class. The main purpose was to prevent the rural population from engaging in the private ownership of agricultural resources and limit their personal access to the market economy, thereby distinguishing them from the working class. There were allowed only kitchen gardens (tamarqa), which they mainly used for their subsistence needs. However, these attempts did not develop the class structures and relations that the Soviet leaders expected, but they nevertheless had an impact on personal relations by either maintaining or transforming them. The state elites became actual or owners of state properties, while the workers of the collective farms accessed these properties and, in exchange, became personally indebted to the elites.5 Consequently, the Soviet institutions were transformed into personal networks of kinsmen, peers and patrons-clients.A similar system of property relations based on personal networks has survived throughout the existence of post-Soviet Tajikistan. Shortly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the state elites struggled to divide state power, resulting in the 1992-97 civil war. Legal reform and the redistribution of land and other agricultural resources started in 1991 and proceeded in an arbitrary manner through the civil war. The final stage of the land reform (1997-2005) reinforced state ownership of agricultural resources, making it the defining principle for property relations.6 Even the introduction of stakeholder (sahmdori), with central regulation of the land reform,7 could not establish equal rights to state properties, including land. Most people have full rights only to their kitchen gardens and to some supporting land plots (presidenti8). This institutional condition has reaffirmed the elites' administrative rights to agricultural resources and activities and has consequently intensified reciprocal and landlord-tenant relations between them and the rural population.Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the share of Tajikistan's agricultural sector in the country's overall GDP has fallen sharply. According to official reports, the contribution fell from 37 percent in 1991 to 18 percent by 2008, even while the sector continued officially to employ two-thirds of the total population. …
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