Turkmenistan plans to increase its 2012 wheat crop by 23 percent year-on-year to 1.6 million tonnes after missing its forecast for the current year, a source in the government of the Central Asian country said on Thursday. The campaign to sow 860,000 hectares of land for the 2012 wheat harvest was already under way in the desert nation, said the source. Like most government officials in the reclusive former Soviet republic, he did not want to be identified.
Turkmenistan had planned to harvest 1.6 million tonnes in 2011 but attributed the shortfall to drought. This year's crop was nevertheless sufficient to meet domestic demand. Turkmenistan, which has a Caspian Sea coastline and borders Iran, Afghanistan, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, is among the driest countries in the world. Its crops rely heavily on irrigation channels as desert covers 70 percent of its land.