Deutsche Welle’s coverage of Turkmen affairs continues as strong as ever. In a recent report, the radio station looks at the shortage of foodstuffs in the market:

“In spite of the change in Turkmenistan’s leadership, the problems that distinguished the regime of the late President Saparmurat Niyazov have remained. Moreover, problems persist in questions that President Kurbanguly Berdymukhammedov has cited as priorities and which the new government has passed a number of decrees and laws to address. The affected areas are the social sphere and the food and medicinal supplies to the population.
As Deutsche Welle correspondent Oraz Saryev reports, the prices of staple products have continued to rise. In the markets, the cost of meat has increased almost twofold. Although, spring has begun costs have gone up for cucumbers, tomatoes and onions. And bread too has become more expensive.
Publicly traded of bread is yet again suffering from a severe deficit, despite the fact that one of Berdymukhammedov’s earliest decrees was to place a state monopoly on the trading of flour and bread.
Private traders with connections have been buying up bread directly from the bakeries and selling them on at speculative prices, just as the government fails keep up with deliveries of the goods.
Difficulties have also arisen with medicine supplies, which Berdymukhammedov also promised to tackle. In state pharmaceutical outlets, prescription medicine is not being issued, and on the few occasion that they are obtainable, it is only in exchange for money and at inflated prices. What is more, much of the medicine has passed its expiry date. Even a simple check-up at the doctors costs a significant amount of money, which means that the less well-off living in the regions prefer not to seek medical attention at all.”

With this as the setting, a few appointments and presidential dictates may be worth keeping an eye out for.
Perhaps a minor note was that on March 5, the president appointed Atamyat Altybayev as head of the Turkmengallaonumleri bread association, with the obligatory warning that poor performance would result in his dismissal after six months.
However, this measure seems a detail as compared with the regular reprisals of the theme of agricultural reform. Most recently, the Khalk Maslahaty adopted a range of reforms, outlined in an IWPR report:

“On March 30, the Halk Maslahaty, or People’s Council – the supreme legislative body in Turkmenistan – is to approve a strategy document envisaging radical reforms in agricultural production and processing over the period to 2030. It will also pass two new laws, one on peasants’ (“dayhan”) associations, the other on peasant farms.

The strategic programme will propose reviewing land improvement arrangements to curb salination caused by poor irrigation, instituting forward-planning for the use of farmland so that irrigation waters are preserved, and transforming small specialised farms on leased land into bigger, diversified farming units.”

But, as IWPR points out, these measures may prove insufficient if they fail to address shortcomings such as lack of credit for agricultural workers and regeneration of barren land. The market for agricultural goods remains strictly regulated, as do the organisations responsible growing and trading them. Moreover, land rights still remain a key issue in the country’s disastrous agricultural sector:

“The way land is distributed in Turkmenistan also hampers production. Although the constitution allows private ownership of some kinds of property, land can only be held in lease from the state. If landholders fail to meet government production targets, their land can be be taken away from them and given to someone else.

When land is constantly transferred from one farmer to another, the quality of the soil deteriorates because it is never left fallow, experts points out.”

As it is, the government is only prepared to countenance technical adjustments, such as when Berdymukhammedov asked Sherip Tajev, the chairman of the Turkmenobahyzmat association in charge of agricultural services, to ensure that farm machinery is assigned to individual farms instead of having them constantly transferred from one holding to another. As Turkmenistan.ru also reports, Berdymukhammedov ordered the deputy Cabinet chairman Hydyr Saparliyev to create vocational schools to train agricultural specialists.

The Deutsche Welle report offers an anecdotal example of the kind of distortion that Turkmenistan’s top-down management of the agricultural sector can bring about, but a starker scale of concern is represented by the most recent World Bank figures (2003) on the importance of rural affairs for the country’s very existence:

“Rural development is critical as it accounts for a 26 percent of GDP, and is a source of livelihood for 54 percent of the population.”

And yet given that much of the difficulties that ordinary people report in the markets begin in the fields, it is striking that Berdymukhammedov continues, like his predecessor, to make a great show of opening industrial food and crop processing plants. On March 31, he inaugurated a flour-grinding and pasta factory in the Mary velyat that, as Turkmenistan.ru keenly notes, will “produce 16 types of macaroni, including famous Italian spaghetti”.