As the Aral Sea shrinks, arid salt flats spread and cotton fields die.

Irrigation has drained the Aral Sea of more than half its surface area.

By SABRINA TAVERNISE

KHUJAYLI, Uzbekistan - Salt crunches underfoot like frosty soil on this bare stretch of land in western Uzbekistan.
“Thirty years ago, this was a cotton field,” said a 61-year-old farmer who has lived near this city all his life. “Now it’s a salt flat.”
Uzbekistan, a land-locked country that was once part of the Soviet Union, is home to one of the biggest man-made disasters in history. For decades its rivers were diverted to grow cotton on arid land, causing the Aral Sea, a large saltwater lake, to lose more than half of its surface area in 40 years.
But old habits are hard to break . Uzbekistan is the world’s second-largest cotton exporter after the United States, drawing a third of its foreign currency earnings from the crop, but that status seems increasingly threatened by corruption, poor planning and the degradation of cropland.
Far less money is spent now on maintaining the vast networks of water drainage and irrigation that crisscross the country than was expended under Communism. Authorities spend about $12 per hectare on maintenance, down from $120 per hectare in Soviet times, according to the International Water Management Institute. Blocked drainage pipes push salt levels up.
A United Nations report in 2001 estimated that 46 percent of Uzbekistan’s irrigated lands have been damaged by salinity, up from 38 percent in 1982 and 42 percent in 1995.
“The delivery system is dilapidated, the drainage system is failing,” said one foreign expert, who asked that his name not be used because he has to work with Uzbek officials. “It is a big problem.”
Cotton and its production are ensnared in politics, so national statistics on it are scarce. But a pattern of decline in the industry was evident in three regions based on local figures provided to The New York Times.
In Karakalpakstan, the region that contains what is left of the Aral Sea, the total area of land under cultivation has dropped by 14 percent since 1991, according to local statistics. In the Bukhara region in the south, land planted with cotton has declined by 15 percent in the past eight years, and in Jizzax, a region in central Uzbekistan, 15 percent of the cultivated land has become too salty to farm.
In Manghit, a small city near Khujayli, an early sign of saltiness came in the 1980s when mushrooms that had grown along the banks of the mighty Amu Darya River began to disappear, a local farmer recalled.
“When you see this salt, sad, dark thoughts take you,” said the farmer, who asked that his name not be used because Uzbek authorities do not like people to speak to foreign journalists .
“Nothing grows on salty land. It’s like standing on a graveyard.”
Uzbekistan’s environmental problems date from the 1950s, when Nikita S. Khrushchev built up industrial agriculture, diverting river flows into a vast new maze of industrial-size canals. Slowly, the land began to change.
The farmer in Khujayli recalled a car trip with his father in the winter of 1954 near the city of Muynoq that began with a crossing of kilometers of Aral Sea ice. Now the shore is more than 80 kilometers away from the city. In the 1970s, his grandfather’s apricot trees died. Salt eats away at shoes here and turns bricks white. “For so many years we raped the land,” said the farmer. “This is the result.”