Page 9 - Uzbekistan rising bne IntelliNews special report

bne December 2021 Special Report: Uzbekistan Rising I 9
In the most radical of all reforms
made since Uzbek President Shavkat
Mirziyoyev took over in 2016, the entire cotton sector has been privatised and production of this vital crop is now entirely owned by private companies.
Cotton has been intimately associated with cotton since Soviet days to the extent that the country’s national emblem features cotton buds on one side and wheat on the other – and wheat production is in the midst of privatisation on the same lines, which is due to be completed next year.
“There used to be a state company Uzpaxtasanoat that owned everything. Today that company has been closed down. It doesn’t exist anymore! It’s
an extremely radical reform. In my personal opinion [it] may be too radical,” Alisher Sukurov, Deputy Minister for Agriculture, bluntly
told bne IntelliNews in an exclusive interview. “But we decided there was no other way and now it’s finished.”
Uzbekistan doesn't boast the hydro- carbon resources that its neighbours Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan enjoy, and after independence in 1991
the country’s main hard currency earner was cotton exports. The sec- tor was tightly controlled by former president Islam Karimov, earning the country some $3bn a year.
Farms were state-controlled and the Karimov administration was constantly tinkering with the forms of financing and production targets, but Mirziyoyev has abandoned the old system entirely and simply sold everything off.
Cotton clusters
Mirziyoyev kicked the process off in 2019 with a decree that launched the sale of the cotton assets, which took less than two years to complete.
The sector was broken up into “clusters” that united the farmers and the cotton processing facilities, and two forms
of privatisation were adopted.
In the first, private investors – almost entirely domestic companies, many of which were moving into agriculture for
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Uzbekistan privatises its entire
cotton sector in its most radical
reform yet
Ben Aris in Tashkent