Ashgabat, Turkmenistan, April 12
By Huseyn Hasanov – Trend:
A regular meeting of the Turkmen-Afghan water coordination group is taking place in the Turkmen capital of Ashgabat, Trend reports referring to the local Altyn Asyr TV channel.
The event is attended by representatives of Turkmenistan’s State Committee for Water Management and the Ministry of Agriculture and Environmental Protection, as well as the representatives of the Afghan Ministry of Energy and Water, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the Afghanistan Geodesy and Cartographic High Office (AGCHO) under the Ministry of Urban Development and Land.
Turkmenistan attaches particular importance to the interaction with the relevant structures of Afghanistan, on the territory of which up to 20 percent of Amu Darya’s runoff is formed, and where the sources of Murgab and Tejen rivers are located, as noted by Turkmen Dovlet Khabarlary state news agency.
This is the third meeting of this kind, held with the support of the regional program titled Transboundary Water Management in Central Asia of the German Society for International Cooperation (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH).
In Central Asia, rivers are the main source of water resources used for agriculture and industry, the production of electricity, and the supply of drinking water to the population, and almost all of them are transboundary, as stated by the Neutral Turkmenistan newspaper.
The Interstate Commission for Water Coordination was established within the framework of the International Fund for Saving the Aral Sea (IFAS), which deals with determining water withdrawal limits in the basins of the largest rivers of the region, taking into account and protecting water resources, and controlling their rational use.
Turkmenistan borders Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Iran and Afghanistan and uses water resources coming in accordance with agreed quotas from four trans-boundary rivers, namely the Amu Darya, Tejen, Atrek and Murgab rivers. Turkmenistan is affected by the problem of the ecology of the Aral Sea, which is most noticeable in the country’s northern Dashoguz Region, where problems have arisen with the provision of drinking water, the fight against salinization of cultivation lands, land desertification.