"Moreover, some of the biggest planning disasters in the world occurred in Soviet agriculture, notably with cotton production in Soviet Central Asia, a sphere in which rampant corruption, and the serious misreporting of production statistics, vied with fundamental environmental degradation not least due to excessive irrigation that caused the exhaustion of the Aral Sea. These problems were a major issue for Mikhail Gorbachev who, in the early 1980s, was the Politburo member responsible for agriculture. Environmental issues included the whisking into the air, as injurious dust, of dried out soil contaminated by chemical fertilisers. This led to an increase of birth defects among Uzbek and Turkmen children. The children living in eastern Kazakhstan were afflicted with such horrors due to the aftermath of nuclear bomb tests."