Roots of our People

Kasym was born on 12 January 1952 in Tört-Kul on the shores of Lake Issyk-Kul. When he finished high school in 1969 he began to work on a collective farm and when he was 20 he joined the Red Army and was sent to Krasnoyarsk in Siberia, where he became a prison guard. Krasnoyarsk was one of the main centres of the Gulag.

In 1984 he graduated in forestry from a university in the east of Kazakhstan and became director of the leskhoz (state forest enterprise) close to his hometown. When the Soviet Union collapsed and the leskhoz territory was divided, he was asked to work for the government in the city of Osh, but his parents were not doing well and he had to return home to take care of them. 

Back in his community, he realized that people were not ready to live in the new system. All factories had been closed; machines weren’t maintained and had fallen into disrepair. For the products that were still made, no more markets existed, because exports to other parts of the Soviet Union had ceased.

Agriculture was important in this transition period. It helped people to survive. Yet the Kyrgyz, who had always relied on their livestock for meat and on their neighbours, the Tajiks and Uzbeks, for vegetable produce, knew little about agriculture.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, strict rules forbidding the cutting of (fruit) trees were no longer enforced and coal, oil, and gas needed to heat homes and workplaces became scarce. During the coldest winters, entire orchards were cut down for firewood as a result. Kasym decided to establish a community group and called it Janycha Jashoogo Kadam Koyolu (JJKK): “Take a step towards a new life.” Twelve families joined. He uses the analogy of athletes walking into a stadium, inspiring the people who are watching them: “If ten families come together and improve their lives,” he thought, “maybe 1000 will follow.”

One of the most difficult things in maintaining such groups is trust, with which the Kyrgyz people have a traumatic relationship: after the collapse, many people wanted to establish co-operatives using the old kolkhozy (collective farms) as a basis, but very often the leaders sold the equipment and left the people without a penny. Now people prefer to work alone rather than collaborate with each other.

Kasym says a good leader is above all honest and transparent when it comes to money. Their group has a small common fund that can be used when families are in need, and they have very strict rules about how it is managed. 

Partly because JJKK had already done many things together (making and selling felt, paintings, gathering medicinal plants), there was much interest in having a communal fruit nursery and it worked well from the start. From the more than 60 apple varieties found in their community, they selected a total of 21, some of which were indigenous and some that were introduced during Soviet times and had adapted to local growing conditions (mostly for the market).

In 2007 they distributed the first batch of saplings to the families of Tört-Kul and a year later farmers from further away had already ordered more than 2000 saplings for the coming years. Kasym now sometimes helps scientists with training events in other communities in Jalalabat and Osh and advises them about running a community organisation. Saplings from the nursery he established with his group were used to establish a nursery at the University of Naryn.

Taken from:

Roots of our People: Fruit trees and their custodians in Kyrgystan and Tajikistan  [1]