Page 36 - bne magazine November 2021_20211104 uzbekistan risding

36 I Cover story bne November 2021
Uzbekistan privatises its entire cotton sector in its most radical reform yet
Ben Aris in Berlin
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
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,
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
“Cotton remains an important strategic sector and a priority. We don't want to de-emphasise the sector. But the approach as to how it should be managed has completely changed”
emblem features cotton buds on one side and wheat on the other – and wheat production is in the midst of
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bluntly told bne IntelliNews in an exclusive interview. “But we decided there was
no other way and now it’s finished.”