Decades of Soviet rule have left a heritage of environmental and social problems in Central Asia. The demise of an entire ecosystem at unprecedented pace, the "Aral Sea Syndrome", is the most prominent of the undesired outcomes of the focus on agricultural production that has dominated land and...

Irrigation water management in Central Asia is notorious for its inefficiency. We assessed the operational performance of the irrigation scheme in one Water Users Association (WUA), Shomakhulum, in Khorezm district, Uzbekistan, in 2007 to provide recommendations for strategic water management...

Salinization of irrigated agricultural land threatens ecological sustainability and livelihoods of people. Salinization is especially severe in the dry lowlands world-wide and in Central Asia where large amounts of salts accumulated in the soil profile, originating from shallow saline...

This study was aimed at quantifying soybean (<em>Glycine max</em>) nitrogen fixation under reduced tillage (RT) and conventional tillage (CT) in a tropical Ferralsol of the sub-humid zone of western Kenya, using the isotope ¹⁵N dilution method. Crop residue (CR) management was a superimposed treatment in...

A wealth of research papers, reports, and newsprint demonstrate the wide international interest in the ecological deterioration in the Aral Sea Basin in Central Asia (CA). The demise of the Aral Sea is a symptom that results from intensive agricultural activities aiming at maximizing...

The objective of the paper is to identify the determinants of access to health care in rural Russia. We started out with the observation that the transition process has affected the provision of social services in the Russian Federation in general, and in rural areas in particular, owing to the...