It is in the mandate of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), as stated in Article 1 of its constitution, “to collect, analyse, interpret and disseminate information related to nutrition, food and agriculture”. Within this framework, in 1993 FAO launched a programme known as AQUASTAT, its global information system on water and agriculture (http://www.fao.org/nr/aquastat). AQUASTAT collects, analyses and disseminates data and information, by country, on water recourses and water use, with emphasis on irrigated agriculture, which is targeted at users in international institutions, national governments and development agencies.

The Central Asia region in this survey is composed of six countries. They are Afghanistan and the five Central Asia countries that were part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) before their independence in 1991: Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan. In the previous survey Irrigation in the countries of the Former Soviet Union in figures: AQUASTAT Survey – 1997 (FAO, 1997b) the five Central Asia countries were grouped into the Central Asia subregion. The present survey includes Afghanistan in the Central Asia region because of the important shared water resources in the Amu Darya and the Tedzhen-Murghab basins. The total area of Central Asia is 4.66 million km2, or 3 percent of the world’s emerged landmass (Table 1 and Table 25). Out of the six countries in the region, Kazakhstan represents 59 percent, and together Afghanistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan occupy 34 percent of the region’s total area. The two smallest countries – Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan – together comprise barely 7 percent of the total area (Figure 2). The region is bordered to the north by the Russian Federation, to the east by China, to the south by Pakistan and to the west by the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Caspian Sea and the Russian Federation. In 2009, the cultivated area was an estimated 40 million ha, which is 9 percent of the total area (Table 1). In Afghanistan 12 percent of the total area of the country is cultivated, falling to just over 4 percent in Turkmenistan.