If someone asks me which crisis worse: food or energy, I would say that both are devastating enough to make people suffer but the food crisis is something that cannot be stand. Obviously the most vulnerable groups are people with low income. It is them who are already experiencing food shortages in Tajikistan. AP has a good piece on that.

More than 1.5 million people, about one-fifth of the population, are threatened by a chronic lack of food, and tens of thousands go entire days without eating anything at all, according to a U.N. report to be issued this week.

This happens mostly because the agricultural sector is destroyed and all the benign fields are sowed with cotton. And the cotton production is the most corrupted sector in Tajik economy. In the end of the day, no one knows where the real profit from cotton production goes to, and those who spend their entire life in cotton fields barely can make both ends meet.

I was shocked last year in fall when I heard in one of the local markets that we already had not have our own vegetables (especially tomato, potato and onion). By that time almost everything was imported from China. Also, at present time if you want to buy chicken, you will not be able to find the local one. Everything is brought from Brazil. I cannot imagine that. Brazil is on the other side of the planet.

Recently, one of the famous journalist Fakhridin Kholbek, in one of his articles argued that our agricultural sector is destroyed because there is no labor force in the regions. Almost every able-bodied man in the regions - where most of the agricultural sector is concentrated – migrated to Russia or Kazakhstan. Women and old people are not able to carry the whole agricultural sector.

I agree with Fakhridin, but I think the main reason for people to leave the country is corruption. The poor farmer can not sell his product for the price he wants to. He has to sell it for a lower price to resellers who have occupied all the markets in the country. The resellers in their turn sell the products for double price.