Impoverished Tajikistan said Sunday it had stopped receiving electricity from energy-rich Turkmenistan due to problems with transit country Uzbekistan, deepening a winter energy crisis.
Supplies from Turkmenistan across a sliver of Uzbek territory had been stopped because "Tajikistan still hasn't signed a new contract for transit" with Uzbekistan, a spokesman for state-run Tajik Electricity told AFP.
Talks were still under way with Uzbekistan on securing an electricity transit agreement for 2009, the spokesman said.
The news meant extra hardship for residents in the mid-winter cold period.
Villages in this mountainous Central Asian state, the poorest country in the former Soviet Union, receive just six hours of electricity a day on average.
Tajik authorities have had a deal to receive 1.2 billion kilowatt hours of electricity annually from Turkmenistan starting in the autumn of 2007.
The latest problems came after Uzbekistan last month cut by half the gas it provides to Tajikistan, the most impoverished state in the former Soviet Union, due to a 10-million dollar debt.
That debt is still not settled and the Uzbek gas deliveries are still at half their normal level. Currently a central route for the illegal drug trade from Afghanistan, Tajikistan plans to develop the hydropower potential of its mountain streams and rivers. Eventually, it wants to become a net export of power to surrounding states including Afghanistan.