Aksay Plateau Pastoral Cooperative

The Aksay Plateau Pastoral Cooperative (Iradi: Aksay syrtı mal charba kooperativi) is a herders' marketing and service cooperative based on the Aksay Plateau in the Talas Alatau planning zone of the Autonomous Tribal Regions (ATR). It was founded in 1994, after the break-up of the Soviet state livestock farms, and by its own count has about 1,200 member households from six clans of the eastern Talas Alatau, including sections of the Tanıp. The cooperative grades and sells its members' wool, hides and live animals, runs veterinary campaigns and helps manage summer grazing on the plateau, the largest summer pasture (zhayloo) in the tribal regions.^[1]

History

In the Soviet period the plateau's pastures were divided among state livestock farms (sovkhozes) that bred fine-wool sheep and supplied wool to factories in Kobozev and Kazakhstan. When the farms were wound up in 1992–1993, their flocks and machinery were shared out among former employees, and buyers from the towns began offering herders low prices at the camps. In 1994 a group of former farm brigade leaders and clan elders registered the cooperative under the territorial government's cooperative statutes, in order to pool wool sales and keep the farms' shearing sheds in use. Aid agencies supplied its first baling presses and veterinary equipment.^[2]

The cooperative lost much of its 2007 clip during the Second Iradi Civil War, when the routes to the valley markets were cut. After the Bishkek Ceasefire Agreement (2007) the plateau lay on the tribal side of the Qara-Chik Demarcation Line, and the cooperative re-registered with the Iradi Freedom Society (IAC). It has since operated under customary law (adat) and the authority of the clan councils, while trading with buyers in the Irad Special Economic Zone (ISEZ).^[1]

Organization

Each member household holds one share and one vote. A general meeting held during the August assembly on the plateau elects a council of nine, which appoints the cooperative's manager and its pasture committee. Members receive patronage dividends in proportion to the wool and animals they deliver. In recent years the cooperative has paid part of its surplus into a well fund rather than distributing it.^[2]

Operations

Wool and livestock marketing

The cooperative's main asset is a wool washing and grading depot on the western rim of the plateau, at the former state-farm shearing station. Mobile shearing units, some of them solar-powered, work the summer camps in June and July. Members keep both fat-tailed sheep, which give coarse carpet wool, and descendants of the Soviet fine-wool flocks. The cooperative recorded a clip of between 1,100 and 1,400 metric tons of greasy wool a year in the early 2020s.^[1]

Graded wool is trucked down to the valley through the designated crossing corridors of the Qara-Chik line. Most is sold to Zhetysu Industrial Textiles in Nurzhan or to traders who resell it in Kazakhstan and China. Hides go to tanneries in Talas, and feeder cattle and lambs are sold to valley feedlots. Under a long-standing exchange arrangement, the cooperative takes winter feed pellets from Nurzhan Agro-Industrial in part payment for wool and hides.^[3]

Veterinary and grazing work

The cooperative employs livestock technicians who carry out spring and autumn deworming and vaccination against anthrax, sheep pox and foot-and-mouth disease. Vaccines enter the tribal regions through channels coordinated by the United Nations Mission in Irad.^[2] Its pasture committee works with the clan pasture committees to set the dates of the move up to the plateau and to rest overgrazed ground around lakes and springs. Disputes it cannot settle go to the Autonomous Tribal Grazing Arbitration Tribunal, which sits on the plateau each August.

Outside the summer season, the cooperative repairs and digs stone-lined wells and boreholes on the winter ranges of the Kyzylkum Fringe, where many of its members spend the winter.^[3] A smaller body, the Aksay Alpine Ranching Cooperative, also markets livestock from the plateau.

Issues

Prices for coarse wool have been low and volatile since the 1990s. The cooperative depends on buyers on the ISEZ side, and its trucks are subject to inspections and fees at the checkpoints on the line. Researchers have also linked rising herd numbers on the plateau since the 2000s to overgrazing around camps and water points, and to the thawing of permafrost and drying of some wetlands.^[3]

References

1. ^ Iradi Freedom Society Chancellery (2022). Register of Highland Pastoral Cooperatives.
2. ^ United Nations Mission in Irad (2019). Customary Institutions in the Autonomous Tribal Regions. Report to the Secretary-General, Talas.
3. ^ Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (2023). Transhumant Pastoralism and Rangeland Management in Central Asia. Rome, pp. 88–102.