As yields decline and government prices remain low, farmers say that profits are increasingly elusive, and in some areas farmers have begun to abandon their fields. One farmer in Jizzax said he had stopped farming one parcel that had grown too salty, and he drove with a reporter past abandoned fields that stretched as far as the eye could see, more than 700 acres, he said.

As in Soviet times, production plans are not closely coordinated with the realities on the ground, and in Jizzax the local authorities, whose jobs depend on fulfilling quotas, have started to force bad fields  about a third of the cultivated land area in the region, according to local statistics  onto state institutions such as the post office, the state pension fund and schools, three farmers there said. Those, in turn, are forced to farm the land or to pay cash to satisfy the quota.

“Jizzax is an experiment,” said one of the farmers, who asked that his name not be published to avoid trouble with local officials. He provided a document for a plot of land that had been abandoned by a farmer and was now the responsibility of a local school. Farmers who did not meet quotas were fined and even taken to court, as was the case in April with 89 farmers.

“Farmers have no rights,” he said. “They are just ordered around by the government.”

The farmers who are fined must pay with cash, which forms the heart of a cycle of corruption that has enriched officials for generations. Those officials, envied and vulnerable to charges of corruption, change with the seasons: In Jizzax, there have been five heads of the main cotton processing factory since 2000, the farmers said.

Some farmers violate the government’s rules and plant crops other than cotton, a practice that has been encouraged by foreign experts who say that crop rotation will allow the land to rest. But the government has often prohibited other crops, not wanting to suffer declines in cotton, and farmers grow other things at their own risk. This spring in Tajikistan, a neighboring country that also relies on cotton, farmers were growing watermelons on the sly, as though they were crops of illicit opium poppies.

“We are destroying ourselves,” said the 61-year-old farmer in Khujayli. “Why are we planting cotton, and what are we getting from it? We never ask those questions.”

The government is starting to acknowledge the problem, and last year it issued an order that will set up a fund for drainage improvements. The World Bank is also financing a program to improve drainage.