Turkmenistan Could Face Bread Shortages Next Year

According to Associated Press, Turkmenistan’s autocratic president on Wednesday accused five regional governors of “outrageous” falsification in an agriculture production report, causing wheat shortages in the ex-Soviet state.
President Saparmurat Niyazov said two of the governors had already been fired, and warned that the mostly desert Central Asian country could face bread shortages next year as a result of the forged reports on winter wheat planting.

“In 2007, there won’t be enough bread for everyone,” Niyazov said. “Last week there were bread shortages in Ashgabat (the capital). People started complaining.”
Niyazov, a former Communist boss who has ruled Turkmenistan since 1985, has maintained Soviet economic planning methods. He opposes importing flour.
He also said that reports on cotton planting in spring were also “massively falsified,” and that only 38 percent of the planned 2.2 million tons of cotton have been harvested this year.
“How could they leave people without bread?” he said. “I could not sleep at night, since I learned about the way you plant wheat.”

Earlier this month, Niyazov ordered criminal investigations into two of the fired governors. The three others were reprimanded.
Turkmenistan and another ex-Soviet Central Asian nation, Uzbekistan, were roiled by scandals in the 1980s after prosecutors discovered widespread corruption, and distortion of agriculture reporting, mostly about cotton harvesting.

Niyazov has developed an elaborate personality cult and calls himself Turkmenbashi, or Father of All Turkmen. Busts and statures of the leader are scattered throughout the country of 5 million people, and all schoolchildren study his books.

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