Addressing Urban Poverty in Uzbekistan in the Context of the Economic Crisis
At the same time, the population has grown much more rapidly
than the area of irrigated land. Consequently, as previously mentioned,
, the hectares of irrigated land per person have declined from 0.22 to
0.12 (CER 2009a) over the past 25 years. And this trend is expected to
continue, if not intensify. Hence, rural areas will presumably continue
to send substantial numbers of surplus workers into the larger urban
areas.
Recent estimates suggest that the deteriorating state of agricultural
land, in combination with the concentration of agricultural production
in larger private farms, will increase the labour surplus in rural areas.
Agricultural employment could fall from its current level of 3 million
workers to 2 million in roughly the next 15 years, (CER 2009a).
Satellite maps highlight another major challenge facing Uzbekistan:
an unbalanced distribution of the population, with very dense networks
of villages and cities in the fertile part of the country and very low
population density in its arid regions. In the dense population areas,
there consequently is intense competition between urban settlements
and agriculture for available land.
Another problem is that Uzbekistan has very few large urban
centres. Tashkent City alone has 2.3 million official residents, which is
nearly one-quarter of the total urban population. Other major urban
centres, such as Namangan, Samarkand, Andijan and Bukhara, are
much smaller. Effectively, Uzbekistan is a country with one large city
and a large number of small cities.
The growth of small and medium-sized cities, which were
established during the Soviet era and were usually linked to major
industrial enterprises, has been stagnant. Since very few Soviet-
era industrial enterprises have survived the transition, the working
populations in these cities have faced severe economic difficulties.
In some ways, their economic prospects are worse than those found
in small townships and village-like settlements, where the working
population has retained at least some access to land. Urban poverty
is consequently likely to be high in such settings. Thus, diversification
of the economic base of Uzbek cities is becoming a major challenge
urgently requiring attention.
It is necessary
to develop
comprehensive
policy papers
on trends in
urbanisation in
Uzbekistan and
the prospective
mid- and long-
term options
for dealing with
them
It is important
to dramatically
improve research
and monitoring
capacities on
urban issues.
B. Policy Recommendations Related to Urbanization
Following is a summary of some priority policy recommendations to address
the increasingly important issues related to urbanization in Uzbekistan.
1) Develop comprehensive policy papers on trends in urbanization
in Uzbekistan and the prospective mid- and long-term options for
dealing with them. The aim would be to evaluate various mid- and
long-term policy options for:
Balancing the urban network with foreseen industrial and
agricultural development;
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