Patterns of accumulation and social differentiation through a slow-paced agrarian market transition in post-Soviet Uzbekistan

Abstract

This article presents an analysis of contemporary Uzbek agrarian change. First, using mixed methods and triangulating secondary and primary data from Samarkand, it untangles emerging relations of production and exchange during the slow processes of market transition. It shows that different types of public investment, price regulation, subsidies, procurement mechanisms, and the pace of marketization to which crops are subject shaped a slow growth of rural social differentiation and private accumulation. Traditionally, cotton farms have been in a privileged position because they have access to more land and subsidized inputs of production. However, due to recent fast-track liberalization policies and state-led investment, farms producing high value crops—fruit and vegetables—are at the forefront of a new pattern of private accumulation. Second, the article reflects on how the gradual approach to market transition has so far squeezed private accumulation, enabling the centralization of surplus extraction from cotton and wheat. This state-led accumulation strategy is slowly fading, leaving space for market-oriented reforms that will entail new but uncertain distributional and developmental outcomes within and outside agriculture.