Abstract
From the earliest days of the Soviet Union, the people of Tajikistan were allowed to have small “kitchen gardens” attached to their homes or in the vicinity of their apartments in which they could augment their diets with fresh food and also keep a milk cow and perhaps chickens. Over time however, families began to produce far more than they needed and would sell the surplus in local markets, along roads, and even in nearby cities—an early example of market-oriented, investment agriculture in Central Asia. By the end of the Soviet era, as much as one third of food sold in the markets was from kitchen gardens. In post-independence Tajikistan, these gardens have allowed families facing civil war, drought, and demodernization to feed themselves and earn some extra income. This paper describes the historic geography, layout and crops of kitchen gardens, and provides quantitative data on the economic importance of these gardens.
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Notes
These amounts are extremely variable as rainfall during the spring of 1999, 2000, and 2008 exemplified. During March 2000 only 70 mm fell while there was no precipitation whatsoever during the months of April and May (FAO/WFP 2000) with almost identical numbers for 2008; however, the spring and summer of 1999 had much higher than average rainfall at nearly 1,000 mm in the spring.
Tajikistan uses the Russian system, based less on morphology than on the interrelationship between physical environment, vegetation, and substrate.
All 33 were also interviewed formally.
Inoyatov and Tulepbayev underscore that “beys, kulaks, and usurers continued to operate in the villages” and that “they still owned considerable tracts of arable lands and pastures”. There is no mention of any tactics other than consolidating small-scale farms or of any responses other than the gratitude of the peasants. Tulepbayev later refers to the “Virgin Lands Scheme” as nothing less than a “success” (1984). Inoyatov attributes other opinions on this subject to “falsifiers” (1966).
“In the case of farms with a single cow, the latter is not collectivized: in the case of farms with several cows, one cow is to be left for personal use, whilst the others are collectivized....In districts where a small livestock industry does not exist, pigs and sheep are not collectivized. Poultry are not collectivized” (Stalin 1931).
There were fewer interviews in Tursunzade District than the other districts because: (1) I had to travel furthest and had to limit interviews to daylight hours for security reasons; (2) it was thus difficult to find men at home and while it is possible as a man to converse with women to whom he has not been introduced, it nonetheless causes concern among many families unless the woman is much older (a problem I also had in Sowda in Shahrinav District because so many men had migrated to Russia); and (3) this district has the largest population of Uzbeks and most women and many men do not speak Tajiki and claim not to speak Russian.
Some farm laborers can rely on animal manure, which young girls collect every morning and which is occasionally used for fuel in lieu of expensive and erratic natural gas.
The large number of ceremonies can be attributed to the fact that most interviews were done in summer and autumn during various crop harvests when prices were at their lowest making the ceremony cheaper than at other times of the year.
Estimates made in Uzbekistan ranged as high as 90% (Craumer 1992).
In 1987, the Tajik government put forth an initiative to ban the practice of forced bussing of high school and college girls and boys from rural schools, and occasionally from urban centers, to the collective farms to pick cotton, noting that some 40,000 collective farm workers had not worked a single day in the fields of their farms. Collective farm presidents even asked schoolteachers not to assign homework during harvest so that they could get the maximum hours of work from the students without their grades suffering (Abakumov and Karpov 1987; Rumer 1991; Sokolov 1988). Although laudable, this initiative has had limited success into the independence years as during harvests one still sees large numbers of school age children in the fields after the start of term on September 1.
Statistics from 1991 through December 1993, show the registered unemployed going from zero (as no one was officially unemployed during the Soviet period) to 500 in April 1992, to 21,600 in December 1993 (of whom only 4,900 received benefits), to 46,900 in April 1996 (of whom 3,300 received benefits) (Ghasimi 1994; Statistical Handbook 1996).
The rural population of the USSR as a whole declined 9.8% during this same period. The rural population in Tajikistan grew in real numbers from 1,130,000 in 1951 to 3,204,000 in 1987. The former oblast of Kurghon-Teppe (now part of Khatlon) grew the fastest with an average yearly growth rate of 3.5% during that period, followed by the RRS with an average yearly, rural growth rate of 2.9% (Craumer 1992). Although early statistics boasted that some two-thirds of the population could be freed for other work by intensive mechanization, the policy was never fully implemented because the government could not supply alternative jobs for the workers (Hodnett 1974; Patnaik 1995).
For the historical processes of this in Soviet times, see Patnaik 1995.
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Rowe, W.C. “Kitchen Gardens” in Tajikistan: The Economic and Cultural Importance of Small-Scale Private Property in a Post-Soviet Society. Hum Ecol 37, 691–703 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-009-9278-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10745-009-9278-6