Turkmenistan, lauded by the United States for banning child labour in its cotton fields, plans to seek foreign investment to help finance a $1 billion expansion programme of its cotton industry up until 2016, a senior official said.
The Central Asian country of 5.5 million people, which is rich in natural gas resources, is among the top 10 producers of cotton and its high quality, fine-fibre "white gold" is used for local production of jeans wear exported to dozens of countries.
"The approved programme of developing the textile industry aims to attract a total of $1.056 in investment in 2012-16," Textile Industry Minister Saparmyrat Batyrov told an investment conference on Wednesday. "The industry faces large-scale tasks of further attracting foreign investment and launching new textile factories."
Turkmenistan, one of the world's more secretive and authoritarian states, had in the past been criticised by rights bodies for widespread use of child labour in gathering cotton. But the country's human rights record has improved since the autocratic ruler Sparmurat Niyazov, who died in December 2006, signed a decree banning child labour. Jeans with a "Made in Turkmenistan" label are sold in a variety of Western supermarket chains, including US company WalMart.
"A presidential decree bans child labour in all sectors and also specifies that children are not permitted to participate in the cotton harvest," the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights and Labour said in its 2011 report. "There are laws and policies to protect children from exploitation in the workplace," it said. "The government effectively enforced the section of the labour code prohibiting child labour."
Since Turkmenistan's independence from the Soviet Union in 1991, more than $1.3 billion has been invested in building new textile factories and modernising existing ones, Batyrov said. This includes $300 million in foreign investment, he said. He said the share of locally produced raw cotton processed into cotton fibre had risen from 3 percent after independence to 51 percent nowadays. Turkmenistan aims for a slight increase in its 2012 crop. The country plans to harvest 1.109 million tonnes, compared with 1.1 million tonnes last year.
President Kurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, who dominates political life in the country and has a rising personality cult, has told farmers to harvest the crop "without losses" this year. Turkmenistan has sown an area of 550,000 hectares to cotton this year - more than twice the size of Luxembourg.