Talk:Moyynkum
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Moyynkum is a Growing Region: a named cultivation region that sits above Growing Areas and below the regional complex and gene pool. It covers the plain of Moyynkum District, Jambyl Region, Kazakhstan, north of the Chu Valley growing area. The valley itself and the mountains to the south belong to Tian Shan (growing region).
Data verification
Check the main page for the sources behind each statement. Discuss the boundary, the status and the accessions and news items that belong to the region here.
Discussion
Why the region is on the map
- Kazinform (29 August 2023) places the Shu (Chu) valley on the lands of seven districts of Jambyl Region, Moyynkum among them, and gives the figures of a topographic survey of 1989 by district: 1,000 hectares in Moyynkum, out of 138,000 in the region. Caravan (30 May 2007) names the same seven districts.
- No source read records cannabis being gathered, sown or destroyed in Moyynkum District. The harvest and the police mowing reported in the Kazakh press are in Shu and Merki districts and in the valley as a whole. Kazakhstanskaya Pravda (21 August 2025) reports 4,500 hectares mown "in the zones in front of the sands" (в предпесковых зонах) of Jambyl Region, without naming a district, so the figure is not used here.
- The region is kept apart from the Chu Valley growing area so that the valley, at the foot of the mountains, and the plain to the north are not one shape.
Growing status
The status is Historical. The only figure for the district is the survey of 1989. Kazinform reported in 2023 that the interior ministry still used it, but that is not a new count, and specialists quoted in the same article held that the actual area in Jambyl Region was much smaller and shrinking with a drier climate. The infobox gives 1989 as the last year a source records cannabis there. This does not mean that it stopped growing: no source says so.
How the border is drawn
- The border is a proxy: Moyynkum District as mapped in OpenStreetMap (relation 3388414), about 49,000 km², the figure in the infobox. Most of it is not under cannabis; 1,000 hectares is 10 km².
- The district does not hold all of the Moyynkum sands. The herbarium sheets labelled "Moyynkum desert" or "Muyunkum", near Akyrtobe (1931 and 1934) and 60 km east of Taraz (1958), come from south of the Chu river, in districts of the Chu Valley growing area.
- The infobox point (44.93, 72.71) is the centre of the district. The border is not drawn from accession or news points.
Accessions
- The seed lot RLB-KAZ-JAM-0120190001 gives a point (44.42, 72.13) that falls inside the district. The seller describes the line as feral, collected in the southern Karatau, so it is not attached to the region. Its reproduction, RSC-KAZ-JAM-0120190001, has no point.
- The three Moyynkum desert sheets record wild plants, lie outside the border and are not attached.
Sources
- Kazinform (2023): read in full. The Kolpakovsky story it tells, quoting Galiya Alimzhanova, has no primary source; the page gives it as Kazinform's account.
- Badaev and Boltaev (2013): read in full. They describe the Shu valley as a whole and name no district.