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Once the world’s fourth-largest inland body of water, the Aral has shriveled to half its former area and a third of its volume. As for the region’s drinking water, even the local vodka has a salty tang.

Wasteful farming techniques and uncontrolled water usage have left more than 1.4 million people in the Karakalpak region of Uzbekistan at the southern end of the Aral Sea to struggle with one of the world’s most complete environmental disasters. Muynak was once a prosperous fishing port and coastal trading post. But the shoreline has retreated 80 kilometers from the town, and half of the 28,000 inhabitants have abandoned the streets and houses.

Six of pensioner Disen Varbustinov’s seven children joined the exodus. Like the others who remain, Mr Varbustinov is determined to stick out. The former fish-cannery worker even seized an opportunity as the sea retreated, building a comfortable new home with eight rambling rooms on the seabed where there were once waves, storms and fishing boats drawn up on the beach. Now all around the house he somehow grows vegetables and grapes in the grey soil that looks like pure sand.

“I mix the sand with fertilizer. But you have to do the proportions carefully and look after it,” Mr Varbustinov says, showing a cracked tomato suffering from an overdose of fertilizer.

The Amu Darya River, once one of the main tributaries of the Aral Sea, has now been completely dammed outside the town, far short of the sea. The dam channels water into a system of lakes that Muynak Gov. Otimurat Kalmuratov believes will boost inland fish farming beyond the 2,000 tons of fish now sent to the primitive fish cannery factory. This is less then 10% of what was once produced in what is still the town’s main employer.

“What we are doing is learning to live without the Aral Sea. We’ll never get it back,” Mr Kalmuratov says, echoing the judgment of almost all involved in the catastrophe. “The problem is that we just don’t get enough water, and what we do get is very salty.”

So salty that it is nearly three times the level that even the salt-tolerant people of the region can drink. Health problems here are enormous: perhaps double the Central Asian infant mortality rate and some of the highest rates of cancer and hepatitis. But the causes are difficult to isolate from factors more general to Central Asia, namely poverty, hunger, alcoholism and despair.

“People here don’t know what a normal life is, otherwise they could not cope with the stress,” says Oral Ataniyazova, a local health activist. She says nobody knows exactly what risks result from decades of heavy agricultural use of fertilizers, pesticides and defoliants and industrial heavy-metal pollution.

“We live the Aral Sea crisis, but for us, the crisis is normal,” Mrs Ataniyazova says. “We are not in an ecological extreme. We are in economic extreme. This is not a high-level crisis like the radiation from Chernobyl. It’s a chronic exposure to low doses of chronic pollutants. As a biological subject, we can survive.”

Outside Nukus, capital of the Karakalpak region, the Amu Darya is now stagnant and 30 meters wide, mocking its old 900-meter-wide river bed. Cars clank across a metal pontoon bridge before climbing up the dirt bank where young boys and wiry old women sell a few pike-perch for about a dollar each. These are the only commercial fish left. The region has little hope of fulfilling the planned cotton quotas from the Uzbek capital, Tashkent, and is finding precious little else to market.

The chief of Karakalpak foreign economic relations, Kutlumurat Sultamurat, says that the previous year’s worst-ever water supply crippled the rice crop. He talks of projects to make paper or chipboard out of rice husks and cotton bushes. He shows off some shelves displaying the few items the region can still produce: licorice roots, polished marble, simple cotton textiles and, last but not least, packaged salt.

(From ‘The Wall Street Journal. Europe’, abridged)