It is arguably the greatest man-made environmental catastrophe in history. Moynaq, once an important fishing town on the shores of the Aral Sea, now lies on the edge of the desert, with the Aral Sea pushed back 150 km! These two rusting ships have been towed, along with nine others, from another part of the desert to form a kind of tourist attraction. This is all that remains of the 500 or so boats that once docked in the town of Moynaq.

Credits: Matic Pavlin (@matic_pavlin, Slovenia)

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Main street in Moynaq, nowadays a dusty provincial town which once used to be a thriving port on the southern shore of Aral Sea and the center of fishing industry of the Uzbek SSR.Credit: Konstantin Novakovic (Serbia) Find all of our photos of the day here.

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Former fishing fleet of Moynaq lying in the lakebed of recessed Aral Sea which now occupies the Aralkum Desert in Uzbekistan. Credit: Konstantin Novakovic (Serbia) Find all of our photos of the day here.

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Shells of the former fishing vessels can still be seen around Moynaq, in western Uzbekistan.Credit: Konstantin Novakovic (Serbia) 

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Rusty fishing boat lying in the sands of Aralkum Desert in Moynaq, Uzbekistan. Credit: Konstantin Novaković (Serbia) Find all of our photos of the day here.

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Aral Sea Monument in Moynaq placed above the former shore of the lake features the depictions of the Aral Sea in 1960 and the current state that are clearly showing its recession and the scale of this environmental disaster.

Credit: Konstantin Novaković (Serbia)

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In a hotel in Moynaq, a former coastal town on the Aral Sea, the owners are moving to a more prosperous town. They leave behind them a flaking painting depicting the Aral Sea in 1977.

Credit : Cyril Caldero (France)

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The artemia, or brine shrimp, a small crustacean that lives in salt water, has become the main product of the Aral Sea in Uzbekistan. The Uzbek government has recently centralised artemia production into a single company, a plan which did not seem to please everyone on the ground.

This article was originally published on Novastan’s French website on 21 July 2020.

The Aral Sea was the fourth largest lake in the world 60 years ago. Today, it has almost completely been dried out due to human activities, causing the disappearance of millions of fish and reducing the number of species by five. However, despite this environmental disaster, one species has survived: the artemia. With the sea now dried up, local fishermen have turned to this saltwater shellfish to generate the majority of their income. The fishermen of Moynaq, in western Uzbekistan, have thus started collecting and processing these shrimps due to the shortage of fish.

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The shrinking of the Aral Sea has increased the salinity of the water which explains the growing numbers of artemia, which thrive in very salty water. The 1 millimetre-long crustacean is generally used to feed fish but also has uses in science, fishkeeping, medicine, pharmacy and cosmetics. The larvae (known as cysts) can be stored for years and can withstand extreme differences in temperature.

Towards a monopoly

But the future of the artemia industry has been a source of controversy since since 2019. On 31 October 2019, the Uzbek government proposed that the 23 or so companies involved in the artemia industry be centralised into just one.

Despite the Antimonopoly Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan’s protests and the recommendations against the project it published on 15 June 2020, Uzbekistan’s prime minister Abdulla Aripov signed a decree on 14 July of the same year creating a state-owned company responsible for the capture, processing and export of artemia cysts. The new structure, Orol Artemia Sanoat, is also meant to support the scientific, technical and technological development of the industry.

The Antimonopoly Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan deemed this centralization ill-advised, an opinion it supports through a text recommending the Uzbek government be less involved in the economy. This point of view is in line with the political philosophy of President Shavkat Mirziyoyev, who says he wants to privatise the domestic economy by limiting state intervention.

Lack of data

It is difficult to measure the impact such a decision has had and will continue to have on the market. In 2020, Novastan attempted to obtain information locally but very few people were willing to talk about it. In fact, the lack of transparency and the strained context surrounding the negotiations over the last few weeks meant the fishermen of Muynaq did not wish to comment.

Only the press office of the Antimonopoly Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan agreed to answer Novastan’s questions, stressing the importance artemia represents for the country. The head of its press service, Manzura Khasanova, said that data regarding the selling price and volume of export of artemia and industry wages did not exist. As for the land and sea portions where artemia is collected, they are under the supervision of the State Committee of the Republic of Uzbekistan for Geology and Mineral Resources.

Although instinctively artemia collection doesn’t seem to be a very sensitive industry, it remains opaque and very closed off in Uzbekistan. The only available data come from the international trade association Global Aquaculture Alliance, which ranked Uzbekistan among the world’s leading suppliers of artemia in 2017, with over 20 tons produced per year.

From the Uzbek side, little information is available to the public. Muynaq-based producers created an association in 2018 to lobby for transparency as well as promote export, but without providing much more detail so far.

The fishermen of Muynaq have been gathering, processing and selling artemia larvae since the early 2000s, when the world’s demand totalled 2,000 tons per year, according to scientific research. A small shellfish, then, but a major economic lifeline for the fishermen of Muynaq.

Malaurie Le Bail
Novastan.org

Translated from French by Manon Montant

Edited by Alice Coveney

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Kourpashas, traditional Uzbek carpets, which adorn the homes of every household, dry in the sun in Moynaq, Karakalpakistan, western Uzbekistan.

Credit: Timur Karpov (Uzbekistan)

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Children playing football on a street in Moynaq. Until a few years ago, this town in Karakalpakistan, an autonomous republic in western Uzbekistan, was still located on the shore of the Aral Sea.

Credit: Timur Karpov (Uzbekistan)

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