August 19, 2011

Turkmenistan to boost 2012 wheat output

Turkmenistan is looking to increase its 2012 wheat harvest by 23% on-year to 1.6 million tonnes after failing to meet the current year's target, a source in the government of the Central Asian country said Thursday (Aug 18).

The campaign to sow 860,000 hectares of land for the 2012 wheat harvest was already under way in the desert nation, said the source. Like most government officials in the reclusive former Soviet republic, he did not want to be identified.

"Our task is to harvest 1.6 million tonnes," he said. Turkmenistan's 2011 wheat crop totalled 1.3 million tonnes, down 7% from 1.4 million tonnes in 2010, when the country became an exporter for the first time.

Turkmenistan had planned to harvest 1.6 million tonnes in 2011 but attributed the shortfall to drought. This year's crop was nevertheless sufficient to meet domestic demand.

Turkmenistan, which has a Caspian Sea coastline and borders Iran, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, is among the driest countries in the world. Its crops rely heavily on irrigation channels as desert covers 70% of its land.

In Soviet times, it depended almost entirely on wheat deliveries from other republics of the Soviet Union. Annual domestic wheat consumption today is about 1.2 million tonnes.