Authorities in Uzbekistan have sent students, schoolchildren and tens of thousands of state employees to the fields in a bid to beat last year's bumper cotton harvest, local rights activists and critics say.
"Pupils of rural schools aged 14 and over are in the cotton fields all of the time, schoolchildren aged between 11 and 13 are taken to fields after classes and on weekends," said Surat Ikramov, head of the Initiative Group of Independent Human Rights Defenders of Uzbekistan.
Several teachers from Tashkent province complained to Ikramov's organisation that they had been told they would lose their jobs if they refused to pick cotton, Ikramov said in a recent interview. Uzbekistan produced 3.77 million tonnes of cotton in 2005 -- its best harvest in recent years, and plans to harvest 3.81 million tonnes this year from its three million hectares (7.4 million acres) of cotton fields. "But cotton depends on the weather, not only on labour, and this year's harvest is not going well in many regions of the country due to a water shortage," an agricultural researcher said. In late October, when the rains start, the quality of cotton falls dramatically, undermining the cotton price -- one of the principal export earners of this Central Asian country.
"This forces authorities to rush to harvest the so-called 'white gold' before the rainy season," said the researcher, who discussed Uzbekistan's cotton harvest on condition that he not be named. Critics say the burden falls on students and schoolchildren, who have been in the cotton fields since early September and are likely to stay there until the state's cotton target is met, which may take until late November.
Students are accommodated in old Soviet barracks, rural school buildings or private houses close to the cotton fields.
They often live under poor sanitary conditions earning very little money, according to critics who say they have first-hand experience of the phenomenon. One of them, a teacher from Uzbekistan's Fergana province, said cotton pickers are paid between 55 and 60 soms (four and five cents) per kilo. A picker could thus make over two dollars per day in mid-September, when 40-50 kilograms is a realistic target. At the end of the season, however, it is rare for one person to pick more than 5-10 kilograms in a day.
"There are many people who want to make money by picking cotton now, but later, when there is less cotton in the fields and this work becomes less profitable, it will be mostly schoolchildren picking the cotton," she said in a telephone interview last month. Under Soviet rule, Uzbekistan's economy was dominated by cotton, with around six million tonnes produced each year -- a policy partly blamed for the drying up of the Aral Sea.
The Soviet slogan that lauded Uzbek cotton as "white gold produced by golden hands" has since become an ironic reminder of a bygone era. Since the Soviet Union's collapse in 1991, Uzbekistan has reduced cotton production to 3.5 million tonnes per year and has eliminated most Soviet-style collective farms.
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