The walnut trade in southern Kyrgyzstan: living with ambiguous plants and uncertain futures

Since the Independence of the Central Asian Republics, social, political and economic recompositions have affected the way people trade. For most of those involved, the capacity to navigate shifting geopolitical conditions, state institutions and personal relationships have been a prerequisite to engage in trade. The literature has primarily explored the trade of manufactured goods, and has overlooked food-related  goods, which are materially unstable. When researching food, social sciences and humanities scientists have been mainly focusing on food security (ex. Dörre, 2024), commensality (ex. Ruhlmann, 2019) historical legacies (ex. Bolatkhan, 2024 ; Smith, 2021) and national identity-building (ex. Aaly Alymbaeva, 2020). Rachel Kay, a PhD student in Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge supervised by Dr Andrew Sanchez and funded by the UK’s Economic and Social Research Council, has been filling this gap by questioning how working lives are shaped by environmental, political and economic change in the trade of walnuts from the forests in south Kyrgyzstan. Agathe Guy (Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes / Ludwig-Maximilians-University) has asked her a few questions about her ongoing research. This interview follows the presentation given by Rachel Kay in the framework of the research seminar “Food and food systems in Central Asia”, coordinated by Aliya Bolatkhan (University of Zurich), Agathe Guy (Ecole Pratiques des Hautes Études and Ludwig Maximilian University) and Irène Mestre (IFEAC).

Agathe Guy: How would you describe the walnut trade in southern Kyrgyzstan?

Rachel Kay: The walnut forests in southern Kyrgyzstan cover around 200,000 hectares. They are semi-wild forests, a mixture of naturally occurring and planted, which are majority walnut trees but are also highly biodiverse in other kinds of wild fruit trees. When the region was incorporated into the Russian Empire, the imperial administration deemed the forests to be both ecologically and economically valuable. This was particularly because the Empire wanted to transform the Fergana Valley into a cotton-growing area, and recognised the forests as important in regulating the Valley’s hydrology. During the Soviet era that followed, the forests were incorporated into the USSR’s planned economy, with walnuts collected by brigades and distributed across the Union. As such, political economic change has ongoingly shaped the relationship between the forests, local people and the state.

The forests are state-owned, and residents of nearby towns and villages rent plots of land from their local state forest enterprise [leskhoz], which were established during the Soviet time. During the autumn harvest, locals collect walnuts on this land. They then sell the walnuts whole to local traders, or they crack the walnuts at home and sell the kernels, which sell for a much higher price. From here, most of the walnuts get exported out of Kyrgyzstan as kernels, and the trade networks stretch across Eurasia, reaching destinations such as Turkey, Russia, China and the Middle East.

To understand the current shape of the walnut trade, it is necessary to consider the political economic and geopolitical history of the region. A layered approach to time is needed (Marsden 2021), since the directions in which goods and people move are the consequence of past and present geopolitical projects, such as the Soviet Union, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the Eurasian Economic Union and Turkey’s policy towards Central Asia. For example, with the arrival of big Turkish buyers around the year 2000, the walnut trade became oriented towards exporting, causing the walnut price to shoot up. After this, plots of forest land became valuable and highly sought-after.

The history of the Central Asian walnut trade is to a great extent a story of massive shifts of networks, from Central Asia’s pre-imperial past to its incorporation into the Soviet Union, then its fragmentation into independent states. Historians have evidenced that prior to the incursion of the Russian empire, the Central Asian region was always somewhat fluid in terms of trade and the movement of people, despite being frequently under the control of external powers (Kalra 2022). Livelihoods in the region have historically centred around trade and nomadic pastoralism, both of which rely on mobility, connectivity and collaboration across difference. Hard international borders, along with the imposition of nation-states and ethnonational identities, are unprecedented and have brought massive disruption to economic and social life across the region.

Walnut traders and collectors are highly exposed to these border arrangements and to geopolitical change more broadly: this is a source of ongoing uncertainty for them. For example, the closure of the Kyrgyz-Uzbek border in the late 1990s totally changed the shape of the walnut trade as routes to Uzbekistan were cut off. In another example, the fall of the Russian Ruble when Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 caused major bankruptcies for those involved in exporting to Russia. My project asks how those involved in the walnut trade navigate the many uncertainties it brings.

Another source of uncertainty lies in the material qualities of walnuts themselves. Walnut kernels can rot, shrivel, change colour and be infected by pests. Whole walnuts have a shell, meaning that the state of the kernel within is hidden. And the kernels themselves are also difficult to know: for example, one kernel trader told me that a major Turkish buyer went bankrupt around 2010 because he had bought kernels without realising they were rotten inside and was then unable to sell them. As such there are many opacities and ambiguities involved in trying to assign economic value to walnuts. This makes the trade of walnuts very different from the trade of manufactured goods. I am interested in how the uncertainties stemming from walnut materialities shape the social and emotional worlds of traders.

 

Who are the people trading and how are they connected?

Walnut traders in Arslanbob are almost all men. Most of them work in the public space of the centre, which is itself a male-dominated sphere. In Bazar-Korgon, however, the traders working at the kernel market are a roughly equal mix of women and men. This difference guided my methodology: in Bazar-Korgon I spent most of my time with the traders, whereas in Arslanbob it was difficult to be in public spaces as a woman, so I spent more time with women in their homes. I also joined a group of women in Arslanbob who sorted kernels for export. This collective was run by a male trader and his wife, and is typical of how the sorting of kernels is carried out across Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. In order for kernels to be exported, or sent to larger markets for retail sale, they needed to be sorted by wholeness and colour. Traders involved in exporting kernels hire workers to do this sorting, and pay them by the kilogram. These workers are nearly always women, usually hired from the trader’s neighbourhood [mahalla]. The income from this would not be enough for a man providing for a family, but for a married woman whose income is seen as supplementary, it is decent. In Arslanbob, though, many of the women who worked in the collective were divorced, and some struggled to make ends meet on this income.

In this way, the trade is built on personal relationships, where gender can sharply delineate life courses and work possibilities, in varying ways depending on location, class and ethnicity. Relationships between traders also reflect the importance of social closeness and distance in these trading worlds, as both trust and mistrust are essential to the functioning of the trade across the post-Soviet space and beyond (see e.g. Fehlings 2022; Humphrey 2018; Marsden 2021; Schröder 2020; Turaeva 2022). Since the walnut trade is both internationally oriented and based upon personal relationships, intermediaries are crucial for translating across languages and cultures, and for mediating between strangers who have no reason to trust each other. This means that when traders make a deal with somebody, they are not simply making a calculation, but are also drawing on the knowledges and affects of their social and emotional worlds.

How do people deal with the uncertain and unstable nature of walnuts?

Over the course of my fieldwork I heard numerous stories of bankruptcies amongst walnut traders: all of the traders I know who have been involved in the trade long-term have experienced this at least once. The walnut trade is risky even for the wealthier wholesale traders. As I mentioned, the riskiness stems partly from the unstable material nature of walnuts, and partly from the exposure of the trade to geopolitical change. Cheating is also very common: sometimes clients simply disappear without paying. I understand this to be because of the structural conditions of economic life, where external conditions – such as price instability, currency exchange rates, scarcity of international clients, the prevalence of credit in the kernel commodity chain, and the general scarcity of local work – make it difficult for people to keep to their word. In this context, the material ambiguities of kernels make it relatively easy to cheat, and perhaps even difficult to avoid cheating.

Walnut traders said to me that they knew their work was risky, but they had no other choice apart from labour migration. There is minimal state welfare, and salaries for state jobs are insufficient, so those employed by the state, such as teachers and doctors, usually do other work on the side. As a consequence, people have to rely on their family and friends to lend them money. This is the case across all of economic life: barely anyone in my fieldwork has a predictable income. Without debt, the walnut trade would not function, and nor would the wider economy. The walnut trade is powered by credit in that many major buyers purchase walnuts on credit, and also because most traders would not be able to enter the trade without borrowing money to start with. Furthermore, intimate debt relations are what enables traders to keep going when they go bankrupt.

The importance of social connections to both post-Soviet and Soviet economic life is well-documented (see Humphrey 2002; Pesmen 2000). In the Soviet time, personal ties were needed for obtaining particular goods and services, but a basic standard of living was provided by the state, and money was less socially important (e.g. Werner 1998). The rapid expansion of monetary transactions and increased desire for money since perestroika has resulted in social and moral confusion about the interplay of money and sociality. Many people in my fieldwork, especially the older generations who experienced the Soviet time, expressed a sense that money is eroding the deeper values of odamgarchilik [humanity] and mehr-oqibat [kindness]. The anthropologist Rano Turaeva also writes about this in Uzbekistan, saying that since the 2000s living and doing research there, she has been hearing complaints ‘concerning the decreasing value of a human and increasing value of money in such statements like: “today money decides if one is a human or not”’ (2022: v). One answer to your question is that people don’t always manage to ‘deal with’ uncertainty, as such. Of the traders I got to know, there were instances of those who stopped working for a time because of the pain of having been betrayed by a formerly trusted client, or became ill from the stress of work, or who left the walnut trade entirely because of the difficulties of waiting for credit.

Apart from social connections and intimate networks of debt, another important part of life is the physical home, land, and the relationships tied up with these, which I understand as an example of what AbdouMaliq Simone calls a ‘holding place’ for uncertainty (2019). Owning land, growing food and keeping livestock for subsistence is common, particularly in Arslanbob, where most families have a large plot of land around their house and often another one outside of the town. If you have a family, a home, land and livestock, you can get through long periods of unemployment. Indeed, the norm for men in Arslanbob is to migrate for work from spring to autumn and then return to be with their families in winter. Over the winter men might do the occasional hustle to make money – buying and selling used cars, or trading walnuts – but usually, most of them are ‘sitting at home’ [uyda o’tir-].

A further response to uncertainty amongst walnut traders is to form connections across difference and across borders. One Kyrgyz female kernel trader in her 40s told me that when she went bankrupt around 2010 she made the money back by going to the big market in Isfara, Tajikistan, and selling kernels there (at this time the border between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan was open). Traders are constantly open to new possibilities. Over the course of my fieldwork, I was pitched a range of business proposals: a common one was the request, sometimes totally serious, that I find clients in England to buy walnuts from Kyrgyzstan. The orientation of the trade towards figures from elsewhere – Turkey, Russia, Azerbaijan, China, Albania, Serbia – meant that I was often interpreted as another one of these figures (though I wasn’t from the usual kind of elsewhere). This reflects the improvisatory nature of the trade, its international orientation, and the importance of personal connections.

Efforts to increase regional connectivity are also happening at the state level. After 1991, a number of collaborative organisations were formed in the region in response to its fragmentation (see Kalra 2022), and new projects continue to emerge. In March 2025, the presidents of Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan signed an agreement on the Kyrgyz-Tajik border, which was closed from 2021. This has allowed the border to reopen, and trade to resume across it. This will shift the shape and possibilities of the walnut trade once again.

 

Bibliography

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Marsden, Magnus. 2021. Beyond the Silk Roads: Trade, Mobility and Geopolitics across Eurasia. Asian Connections. Cambridge University Press.

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Simone, AbdouMaliq. 2019. Improvised Lives: Rhythms of Endurance in an Urban South. After the Postcolonial. Cambridge: Polity.

Smith, Alison. 2021. Cabbage and Caviar: A History of Food in Russia. Reaktion Books.

Turaeva, Rano. 2022. ‘Measuring Humans Through Money: Anthropology of Debt in Post-Soviet Economies’. Journal of Extreme Anthropology 6(1):i–xvii. doi:10.5617/jea.9791.

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All references (and more) can be found in the Zotero Group Library “Food and Food Systems in Central Asia”[https://www.zotero.org/groups/6199729/foodandfoodsystemsca ]

 

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